Centro de Innovación en Productividad

Delivering Real Value Through Integrated, Enterprise-Class Online Solutions

The mission of the Centro de Innovación en Productividad (CIP) in the Spanish region of Catalonia has been to help companies become more productive through the innovative use of technology. Many regional companies had shown interest in working online, and CIP wanted to offer a truly integrated, enterprise-class service to meet their needs. Some companies were struggling to use Google Apps and a dozen other online or hosted services. They had to juggle multiple passwords and navigate a dozen different user interfaces. When CIP begin to offer the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft® Online Services, though, that changed. With the Business Productivity Online Suite, CIP clients can access a suite of enterprise-class online services, with a consistent interface and a single sign-on. As the barriers to online productivity fall, new doors are opening for CIP.

Situation

Small and mid-sized organizations throughout the Spanish region of Catalonia routinely turn to the Centro de Innovación en Productividad (CIP) to learn how to operate their businesses more efficiently and productively. CIP offers training programs and technology demonstrations on a wide range of Microsoft solutions. It provides total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) analysis that can help local companies make well-informed and well-considered business decisions.

But until recently, CIP had no compelling options to offer small and mid-sized organizations that did not want to invest in the on-premises infrastructure required to run a solution such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 or Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Even the small companies expressed a desire to take advantage of the features these powerful messaging and collaboration solutions could offer, but often they did not have the internal resources to support these solutions.

The Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services, however, changes all that. These online messaging and collaboration solutions eliminate the need for on-premises infrastructure, making them an ideal solution for the small and mid-sized organizations with which CIP is working. It also opens doors for CIP to offer additional services that can ultimately benefit everyone.

Solution

The Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services enables CIP clients to gain access to a range of enterprise-class services without having to procure or maintain an in-house infrastructure for those services. Microsoft Online Services enables access to collaboration tools and shared workspaces, workflow, desktop and mobile e-mail, calendaring and contacts, instant messaging, presence, audio/video conferencing, and Web conferencing. Yet because the applications supporting these services—including Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online—run on servers residing in state-of-the-art Microsoft data centers, neither CIP nor its clients need to invest in on-premises infrastructure to take advantage of these services.

Microsoft hosts and maintains the servers with its own staff of hardware and software experts, supplies patches and security updates in real time, and guarantees 99.9 percent uptime with financially-backed service level agreements (SLAs). CIP clients always have access to the latest, most up-to-date versions of the applications to which they subscribe—without any of the headaches or overhead associated with supporting or maintaining them.

The Business Productivity Online Suite offers still other advantages to CIP clients. Instead of having to purchase separate server and client licenses for infrastructure components such as SharePoint Server or Exchange Server, organizations using this service can simply subscribe to the applications they want to use on a per-user, per-month basis. This eliminates up-front licensing costs and enables most organizations to cover the nominal expense of accessing these services using operational rather than capital budgets. Organizations can provide their users with access to the entire Business Productivity Online Suite for one low monthly fee. If a user needs access to only one service—Microsoft Exchange Online, for example—it is possible to subscribe to a single service only for an even lower monthly fee.

Migrating Competitiveness from Google Apps and More

The fact that a client can access all these critical messaging and collaboration solutions from one source, however, is proving to be important to CIP clients. Consider CIP client Competitiveness. Competitiveness provides consulting services that helps clusters of companies become more competitive in the global marketplace. It has 25 full time employees and, at any given time, 25 or more customer trainees working all over the world. While Competitiveness is officially based in Barcelona, the company operates virtually. It has no formal office space. In fact, since 2007, Competitiveness has operated entirely online and relied on applications and infrastructure provided by Google and other service providers.

We'll benefit not only from reselling the Microsoft Online Services themselves but also from offering additional training and support services to extend those services. Albert Esplugas Director Centro de Innovación en Productividad

Competitiveness was comfortable with the idea of working online, but the company’s needs had given rise to a complex mixture of services. On any given day, its 50 users worked with Google Apps, SugarCRM, WebEx, MindSalt, SurveyMonkey, BeamYourScreen, and more. In all, Competitiveness was relying on more than a dozen application and service providers. That meant more than a dozen user interfaces and more than a dozen passwords for each employee to remember and re-enter on a daily basis. The Google applications tended to be somewhat basic in their functionally, so Competitiveness employees typically ran the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools on their laptops, saving their documents and presentations to Google Docs whenever storing them. That, however, posed compatibility and formatting issues, as Google Docs converted the files to the formats associated with Google Apps whenever the Competitiveness employees saved them in the “cloud.”

In an effort to simplify logging on and overcome application incompatibility and integration issues, Competitiveness approached CIP. To CIP, the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services offered an ideal solution. By itself, the Business Productivity Online Suite could provide many of the features and functions that Competitiveness had been relying on multiple providers to deliver—and it could provide access to all these services with a single password. Employees could continue to use the Microsoft Office applications on their laptops and save their documents and presentations to a SharePoint Online workspace in the cloud. However, they could save all their files in the online workspace without worrying about unanticipated formatting alterations. Unlike in Google Docs, the files stored in the SharePoint Online repository remain in their native format—so they appear just as they were saved when next reopened on a user’s laptop in Microsoft Word, Excel®, or PowerPoint®.

For Competitiveness, the Business Productivity Online Suite proved to be the ideal solution. CIP set up accounts and migrated the company’s users in a matter of weeks. Now, the only online services Competitiveness relies on aside from the Business Productivity Online Suite are its online banking and CRM solutions. The functionality delivered by the other online 11 services are now supported by Microsoft Online Services and the Business Productivity Online Suite. And, CIP is already in conversations with Competitiveness about how the company can use customized SharePoint Online applications and the workflow features of SharePoint Online to deliver even greater value to employees and clients around the world.

Benefits

For partners such as CIP that are interested in expanding the value that their organizations can offer in the marketplace, the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services delivers singular and significant opportunities. It provides a cost-effective path for small and mid-sized organizations to gain access to enterprise-class messaging and collaboration solutions. At the same time, it does not ask either CIP or its clients to support the burden of having to build, support, or maintain an enterprise-class infrastructure. The Business Productivity Online Suite opens up access to clients that might have wanted, but been unable to afford, an enterprise-class messaging and collaboration solution. And, it provides CIP with opportunities to extend its reach and increase revenues through the delivery of wrap-around support and customization services.

Expanding Reach

The Business Productivity Online Suite makes it easy for CIP to reach to new customers, new segments, and new scenarios. Until the introduction of the Business Productivity Online Suite, there was no cloud-based enterprise-class messaging and collaboration service that CIP could offer its clients. It could only promote more costly on-premises solutions. Now, though, with a full-featured, enterprise-class service that it can offer clients on a per-user per-month subscription basis, CIP can have conversations with customers like Competitiveness and offer them a solution unlike any available on the Web these days.

“The Business Productivity Online Suite can get us into smaller companies or into companies that have no capacity to develop a data center,” says Albert Esplugas, Director of CIP. “Microsoft Online Services delivers a high SLA even to small companies, which makes it very attractive.”

Increasing Revenue

The Business Productivity Online Suite also helps CIP expand its revenue streams. While CIP receives recurring revenue from Microsoft for every client it signs to the Business Productivity Online Suite service, it also expands its revenue streams because of the value-added services it can provide to the clients who subscribe to the Business Productivity Online Suite. Indeed, Microsoft studies have shown that for every U.S. dollar a service provider such as CIP earns from the monthly subscription fees remitted by Microsoft, it can earn $5 to $6 USD through value-added services associated with training, development, customization and other value-added managed services.

“As a center that works with a lot of businesses that can benefit from the Business Productivity Online Suite, we'll benefit not only from reselling the Microsoft Online Services themselves but also from offering additional training and support services to extend those services” says Esplugas.

This is “software plus services” as Microsoft has envisioned it. By supporting the Business Productivity Online Suite and offering those value-added services that extend it to meet more client needs, CIP becomes even more of a trusted advisor, and that leads to benefits for all concerned.

Increasing Business Velocity

With the Business Productivity Online Suite in its service portfolio, CIP is in a position to increase the power and efficiency of its customer sales and service teams. Its teams can initiate and close deals more quickly, perform value-added customization and configuration services remotely (lowering internal costs by as much as 40 percent), and increase its margins by redirecting resources toward the delivery of higher-value strategic services. It can also get clients up and running on the Business Productivity Online Suite far faster and with far fewer resources than it could if the client were deploying an on-premises solution. In the past, it might have taken several months to fully deploy an on-premises solution, but now a client may be up and running on the Business Productivity Online Suite within the same number of weeks.

“As an online service that is ready-to-go, the Business Productivity Online Suite eliminates significant barriers,” says Esplugas. “It used to be that I could tell a client all about how Web conferencing could improve their productivity and efficiency, but I’d then have to talk about building out the data center, installing the hardware and software, personalizing the software, and so on. With the Business Productivity Online Suite, I can say ‘We’ll set up an account for a 30-day trial and see how you like it. If you do, we can carry on month to month after that.’ We can move a lot faster, and that gets a much more positive reception.”

Microsoft Online Services

Microsoft Online Services is a business-class communications and collaboration software offering delivered as a subscription service, hosted by Microsoft, and sold with partners. These services help make it easier for customers to rapidly and cost-effectively access the most up-to-date technologies, and are designed for rapid deployment to provide customers with streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security.

For IT staff, Microsoft Online Services helps reduce the burden of performing routine IT management tasks such as installation, provisioning, ongoing maintenance, patches, updates, and upgrades, making it possible for them to spend more time on initiatives that move the business forward. These services are backed by strong SLAs and are designed to meet the regulatory compliance and reliability needs of enterprise customers. On a technical level, the services boast the sophistication and reliability that customers expect from Microsoft, which continues to invest heavily in building data centers to support these services.

For more information, visit: www.microsoft.com/online.