Moving to the Cloud Increases Productivity for Russian IT Provider

Microsoft Office 365 Customer Solution Case Study

Moving to the cloud increases productivity for Russian IT provider

Overview We have construction sites located all over, and we chose Country or Region: Russia Office 365 because Microsoft cloud technology enables us to Industry: Professional services remain mobile, and have access to information and files Customer Profile ITC is part of a construction holding from almost anywhere. company that carries out the integration Sergey Mikhaylov, Director, ITC and implementation of IT projects for the constructions firm’s business groups. Information-Technology Company Ltd. (ITC) provides IT services Business Situation In order to cut hardware and deployment for a construction holding company, carrying out the integration costs, the management of Information and implementation of IT projects. The holding company Technology Company Ltd. decided to move from an on-premises system to the consists of two subsidiaries. One is IT system administration, cloud. which implements and manages IT infrastructure projects, and

Solution also manages organizations conducting software integration and Microsoft Office 365 provided ITC with development. The other, which includes the construction improved uptime, and centralized access to all company information. holding groups, covers the main phases of modern residential areas construction, from investment and construction through Benefits Increased efficiency maintenance. Decreased labor costs Lower IT overhead ITC’s entire focus—business-critical services, which the company maintains for its internal customers—is on data processing centers. This fact puts the business a lot of scrutiny, and sets high quality expectations for data support. Situation synchronized, and all user accounts were transferred, after which all users The company needed to optimize the automatically received access to cloud existing centralized infrastructure in order email. Besides this, Microsoft SharePoint to decrease maintenance and integration Online ensures joint operation with all costs for the products used. Initially, ITC users' documents, regardless of their chose the strategy of consolidating location. infrastructure into a single platform, which gave a significant advantage during “In our business, project teams are quite maintenance, and when integrating with mobile and the geography of the projects other systems and upgrading to new is rather wide, all that requires the mobility technologies. of a user's workplace and its quick build- up,” says Mikhaylov. “Our goal is to create Placing all business applications and fast and effective access to IT services in services into one data processing center any regional or national location. leads to certain risks however. It also Meanwhile the major risk is the threat of requires a fault-tolerant operation of fault-intolerance. The Office 365 service has services, which uses a considerable amount a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% - which is of IT resources. ITC chose instead to less than 9 hours of service downtime per outsource with Microsoft Office 365, an year. Providing such an indicator in our online service which unites familiar own DPC would be too costly.” Microsoft Office applications with email, calendaring, collaboration, and Aleksey Butakov, Business Development communication solutions. This strategy Manager of Softline points out, “These allowed the company to concentrate on days, people talk a lot about 'the cloud’, solving business problems by reducing the but when speaking of the benefits of cloud resources needed for the maintenance, technology, only few conclusions are made. adjustment, and support of its services. "We In fact ‘the cloud’ is a new business have construction sites located all over, and opportunity, which give our businesses we chose Office 365 because Microsoft universality, flexibility, and a chance to cloud technology enables us to remain integrate not only with internal but with mobile, and have access to information and external services also. ‘The cloud’ allow us files from almost anywhere," says Sergey to change business development strategy. Mikhaylov, Director of ITC. For this reason cloud technology is not just another IT instrument, but a strategic asset Solution of the company. I'm extremely pleased that ITC became not only the first company in After a thorough selection of the Russia to use Microsoft Office 365 cloud candidates a choice of Softline as a partner solutions for commercial purposes, and not company was made. In the course of the only the first Softline client in the cloud project, the local IT infrastructure of ITC solutions sphere of Microsoft Office 365, and the Microsoft cloud were integrated. but also an organization that found the Microsoft Active Directory was right approach to this technology—seeing

24 ‘the cloud’ as a strategic asset. I'm quite In the future, ITC is planning to continue positive that a steady and sustained growth developing its use of cloud technology, is awaiting the construction company, for transferring its business processes to the support and development of which ITC was cloud, cutting maintenance and system created, since they made the right administration costs, and at the same time investment!” increasing quality. “We believe that with the active use of the Microsoft single Benefits platform and its cloud services, we can achieve outstanding results,” says Sergey After implementing Office 365, employee Mikhaylov, concluding that, “Our migration workstations consist only of a laptop to the cloud is not limited to Office 365 connected to a 3-G modem plus a only. We would like to move not just our Windows Phone 7. All that is required to email services, portal, and communications, make a new employee operational now is but also our business applications, to set up a user account and provide an including the ones we develop ourselves.” Internet channel. After this all of the services - Exchange Online, SharePoint At the moment ITC is implementing a new Online, and Lync Online communication project, moving the its integrated data bus tool are available to a new user after to the cloud using Microsoft operating logging into the system through a browser. system Windows Azure, and all new If there is no connection, the user can use software development projects are carried the usual working tools with the help of out only in the terms of implementing Office 2010 Professional Plus, also included them as web services. in Office 365 package, installed on a laptop.

As the result of implementation, ITC significantly increased the efficiency of its business processes, reduced labor costs of the IT department used to maintain the infrastructure of the company, as well as total costs of maintaining the PC stock and the cost of maintaining work stations due to the now-centralized management and updates. In addition extra hardware resources in the data processing center of ITC were made available, and the ITC service team got more time to solve important business problems, which used to be spent on maintaining and updating the systems.

Future implementation plans

34 Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online—with the latest version of our Office desktop suite and companion web applications for businesses of all sizes.

Office 365 helps save time and money, and it frees up valued resources. Simple to use and easy to administer, it is financially backed by a service level agreement guaranteeing 99 percent reliability. Office 365 features robust security, IT-level phone support, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, and the business-class privacy controls and standards that you expect from a world-class service provider.

For more information about Microsoft Office 365, go to: www.office365.com