Case Notes – E5 Global Transformation
Project overview
Towards the end of 2015, a Support Services company projected that their year sales would likely fall and operating profit would be well below previous expectations. This sparked a new approach and a new transformation programme to revitalise their presence in the market place.
The Support Services’ company’s Board and leadership team identified an opportunity to increase the business’ speed to market. They needed to improve the way they serve their customers and enhance the employee productivity, by moving to a modern Office 365 and Skype for Business experience.
Following a customer recommendation from a successful prior engagement, risual was selected as the partner of choice to drive business change through Office 365 and Skype for Business. This encompassed designing, building, deploying and potentially operating the solution through risual’s Managed Services division.
Business drivers
There were four key business drivers behind the transformation program:
- Managing costs more effectively to contribute to improved profitability.
- Optimising the operational model at the Support Services company, by enabling IT to become a service provider to the business enabling it to become more responsive and agile.
- Giving workers a modern, up to date, working environment to increase collaboration and productivity.
- Adopting a cloud first strategy so that the company’s IT team could focus on value-add activities rather than spending time continually managing an on-premises estate.
The organisation had a desire to move away from their existing solutions. This was based on the increasing cost of having to support legacy technology combined with a declining confidence in the road maps of these technologies. The business benefits for moving away from these solutions were to support and enable a more flexible workstyle, to reduce the cost and complexity of the management of these solutions, but also ensure that resiliency was baked in.
risual and Microsoft working together
risual’s Account Manager James Connolly was in regular contact with the company’s Microsoft Account Manager as we built and shaped the proposal. Working together with Paul helped risual understand the significant changes happening to the existing IT team and how this impacted the organisation’s decision making on their technology strategy.
Microsoft solutions purchased and consumed
The Support Services company purchased a new ESA including Office 365 E5 + PSTN calling which gives them access to the advanced workloads of Office 365 and is being rolled-out across their entire user population of over one thousand users.
The key workloads that drove their decision to purchase the Office 365 E5 SKU were Cloud PBX, PSTN Conferencing and Advanced Threat Protection. Once the business case had been built around the cost savings and benefits of each workload it became apparent the E5 SKU was the most cost effective method of purchasing the licenses.
Why was risual selected?
risual was selected to work due to their responsiveness to the customer’s changing requirements and demonstrated a strong technical depth in each Office 365 Advanced Workloads. The company needed a partner with both the depth of expertise (in Skype for Business Enterprise Voice for example) and the breadth of capability to span all the elements of their transformation program (e.g. Windows 10 is also part of the workplace modernisation programme). In summary, risual established a great working relationship with their team and Microsoft.
Benefits of the solution implemented
The predicted benefits are threefold:
- Closer cost control and cost forecasting. By moving to a cloud service model, the Support Services company can see the opportunity to forecast their usage and optimise their investment in Microsoft technology in line with business demands. This is ultimately to deliver annualised cost savings of £8.5m.
- An improved end user experience to attract better talent. A large proportion of their workforce are developers and young tech-savvy developers expect to have the ‘latest and greatest’ technology in their everyday working lives. This makes them more competitive in the marketplace for talent.
- Vastly improving the company’s ability to communicate and collaborate to meet client’s needs faster – one of the key factors for their ability to win in their own marketplace is the speed and efficiency by which they service their customers. Through Office 365, team members from around the world can communicate and collaborate more efficiently to deliver on client’s needs.
