Microsoft Office 365Customer Solution Case Study

IT Services Firm Improves Project Execution and Lowers Costs with Hosted Solution

OverviewCountry or Region: ChileIndustry: IT services

Customer ProfileHeadquartered in Santiago, Chile, Serviex is an IT services company that provides business productivity and IT outsourcing services to customers in Chile and Brazil.

Business SituationAfter Serviex learned about Microsoft Office 365, it started a pilot to understand how Office 365 can help resolve communication challenges for itself and its customers.

SolutionWith new messaging and communication capabilities, such as email archiving and federation with customers and partners, the pilot team confirmed new opportunities with Office 365.

Benefits Improves project execution Reduces phone and travel costs Provides new opportunities for its

customers

“Using Lync Online instead of the phone will help save us money. During the pilot, my team went from making approximately thirty external phone calls a day to making only five calls.”

Jorge Patricio Díaz Guzmán, Director of Unified Communication Services, Serviex

Serviex is an IT services firm that provides business productivity and IT outsourcing services to customers in Chile and Colombia. Its unified communications services team helps customers implement and manage communication applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Lync Server. After Serviex learned about Microsoft Office 365, it joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program to pilot the solution and understand how Office 365 can help resolve communication challenges for itself and its customers. The pilot team anticipates the new messaging and communication capabilities in Office 365 will help them reduce their phone and travel costs and improve project execution with their customers and partners.

SituationFounded in 2003, Serviex is an IT services company whose main focus is to help its customers increase sales and lower costs with technology solutions. Headquartered in Santiago, Chile, its 80 employees provide business productivity and IT outsourcing services to customers in Chile and Colombia.

The employees at Serviex are grouped by their technology expertise to better serve their customers. Jorge Patricio Díaz Guzmán is the Director of Unified Communications (UC) and leads the UC team at Serviex. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). His UC team helps customers analyze, design, implement, and manage communication applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Lync Server. For its in-house communication solution, the UC team uses the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) for messaging, instant messaging, conferencing, and project collaboration. The Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of hosted messaging and collaboration solutions that includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Communications Online. “With the amount of daily coordination required during projects, we consider communication tools critical to our business success,” says Díaz Guzmán. “BPOS provides the communications capabilities we need along with high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management.”

The presence and instant messaging solution worked well for ad-hoc

communications among the UC team members; however, the team wanted to include its customers and partners into these project conversations to improve customer response, reduce travel expenses, and deepen external relationships. Díaz Guzmán says, “As instant messaging became a primary tool for communications inside our company, our employees could not communicate as easily with external team members during projects.” Instead, they had to send an email message or make a phone call. The lack of presence information and instant communications options would sometimes lead to delays in project execution or require additional costs for long-distance phone charges and travel expenses.

Another issue the team faced was the lack of an archiving solution. Employees wanted to keep their email and instant messages from past projects, but they did not want the large volume of email to reduce the performance of the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client.

When Microsoft announced the next-generation of cloud-based services, Serviex reached out to Microsoft to hear more about how an upgrade from Business Productivity Online Standard Suite to Microsoft Office 365 could benefit its project execution and potentially lower its costs. In addition, Díaz Guzmán and his UC team wanted to learn about what opportunities Office 365 would be able to provide for their customers. “Since many of our customers have no IT staff, they rely on our expertise when it comes to new communication technologies,” says Díaz Guzmán. “When we first heard about Office 365, we were excited about the possibilities

25

this hosted solution could provide for our customers.”

SolutionAfter Serviex learned about Office 365, it joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program to pilot the solution and understand how Office 365 can help resolve communication challenges for itself and its customers. Office 365, the next-generation communications and collaboration cloud-based services from Microsoft, combines the latest Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online.

The pilot team was happy to see the capabilities of Office Communications Online and Live Meeting combined into one solution with Lync Online. Now project teams can take advantage of the intuitive communications capabilities with presence, instant messaging, and a rich online meeting experience with PC-audio, video, and web conferencing. Díaz Guzmán and his UC team were most excited about the ability to communicate with external organizations through Lync federation. “With the federation in Lync Online, we can instantly connect with our customers and partners who use Lync,” notes Díaz Guzmán. “We can see their presence and then quickly start an ad-hoc project status conversation.”

The pilot team also tested the archiving and email management capabilities available in Microsoft Outlook 2010 and the updated version of Exchange Online in Office 365. The consultants can drag and drop important items into an archive mailbox that sits alongside their Inbox.

They can also use retention policies to automatically save items to the archive as needed, ensuring that administrators can access data during compliance audits. Employees can access this archive mailbox in the same way they access their primary mailbox. In addition, employees can search both their personal archive and primary mailbox. Díaz Guzmán says, “We are always excited about new capabilities that help us manage our inboxes better. With Exchange Online in Office 365, we can now take advantage of all the rich email and calendar management capabilities in Outlook 2010.”

The UC team is already talking to customers about opportunities to reduce costs and improve their IT services with Office 365. Díaz Guzmán says, “Our customers share in our excitement about the capabilities in Office 365. They want to know how soon we can help them transition to these new cloud-based services.”

BenefitsThe UC team at Serviex looks forward to its internal transition to Office 365 as well as to the opportunities to bring this service to its customers. Although Serviex already achieved significant cost savings when it switched to a Microsoft hosted solution several years ago, the team anticipates Office 365 will help them reduce their phone and travel costs even further. The team also expects the new messaging and communication capabilities to help them improve project execution with their customers and partners.

Improves Project ExecutionWith Lync federation, the UC team will improve ad-hoc communications between

35

“We view Lync federation as especially important for our long-term IT outsourcing projects, where building stronger relationships with our customers gives us a competitive advantage.”

Jorge Patricio Díaz Guzmán, Director of Unified Communication Services, Serviex

its employees and its customers and partners. The company anticipates this interaction will result in faster project execution and richer external relationships. “We can deliver better service to our customers since they can see our availability and then click to connect with us through Lync Online,” explains Díaz Guzmán. “We view Lync federation as especially important for our long-term IT outsourcing projects, where building stronger relationships with our customers gives us a competitive advantage.”

With Exchange Online and Outlook 2010, the UC team also expects to save time on managing inboxes with robust archiving and automatic retention policies. With this time savings, the team can spend more time working on customer projects.

Reduces Phone and Travel CostsWith Office 365, the UC team also expects to reduce its phone costs by 80 to 90 percent by reducing the amount of long distance phone calls needed between each other and with customers and partners. “Using Lync Online instead of the phone will help save us money,” says Díaz Guzmán. ”During the pilot, my team went from making approximately thirty external phone calls a day to making only five calls.”

Díaz Guzmán also expects that his team will reduce travel costs with the communication capabilities in Lync Online. Díaz Guzmán says, “For some customers, we can reduce the amount of time we need to be onsite since we can easily offer our support using the conferencing capabilities of Lync Online. We anticipate reducing our travel costs by up to 70 percent for certain projects.”

Provides New Opportunities for Its CustomersBy conducting a pilot of Office 365, the UC team also evaluated how Serviex could enhance customers’ communications and collaboration solutions. The team believes its customers can reduce costs, improve productivity, and reduce administration with Office 365. Its customers will have the flexibility to easily scale-up or scale-down their licenses with a pay-as-you-go licensing subscription model. With Office 365, customers can adapt to business changes faster and ensure that they are only paying for the capacity and services they need.

Díaz Guzmán concludes, “With Office 365, we can now offer our customers advanced productivity capabilities that were previously cost prohibitive. For many smaller companies this may be the first time they can take advantage of messaging, presence, instant messaging, and conferencing in a single seamless solution. For larger companies, we see this as an opportunity for them to reduce IT costs, while their businesses benefit from the latest communications and collaboration capabilities from Microsoft.”

45

“With Office 365, we can now offer our customers advanced productivity capabilities that were previously cost prohibitive.”

Jorge Patricio Díaz Guzmán, Director of Unified Communication Services, Serviex

Microsoft Office 365Microsoft 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 that guarantees 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

55

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Serviex Technologies products and services, call 56 (2) 484 8652 or visit the website at: www.serviex.cl

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Office 365− Microsoft Exchange Online− Microsoft Lync Online− Microsoft SharePoint Online

Microsoft Office− Microsoft Lync 2010− Microsoft Office 2010