Headquartered in Beijing, China, Sohu.com provides Internet services such as search, advertising, and online gaming. Employees use email for business-critical communication, so the company’s messaging solution must be highly available and secure. Recently, Sohu decided to evaluate upgrading to Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 to help improve messaging compliance, ensure high availability, and reduce hardware costs and administration.

Aston Martin builds beautiful sports cars. Its employees are passionate about their work and challenge themselves to stretch the limits of automotive performance. Equally passionate about the business, the IT staff at Aston Martin wanted to focus on strategic projects and work more proactively to improve processes and technologies. To free IT resources from routine administration tasks while still providing the latest communications and collaboration capabilities, Aston Martin chose Microsoft Office 365. The cloud-based solution provides employees with familiar Office applications, plus enterprise-grade email, conferencing, and collaboration solutions. By providing easy access to business-critical productivity tools, enhanced security, and reliability through Office 365, Aston Martin is able to foster collaboration and improve business processes while reducing IT administration.

With 82 sites across Australia, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, Komatsu Australia has employees who work in many locations. Because its employees rely heavily on its messaging solution to communicate with each other and with customers, Komatsu must ensure that it has a highly available, efficient system in place to support them. Employees at Komatsu save their email messages for future reference and mailbox sizes were growing rapidly. Komatsu was using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for email and voice mail and wanted to implement an archiving solution to help employees better manage their email. Komatsu upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 to take advantage of the built-in archiving capabilities and enhanced high-availability configurations to reduce administration requirements while improving availability and providing new capabilities to employees.

Axept Webcall is a division of Swisscom, the largest telecommunications company in Switzerland. It provides engineering and operation services and specializes in Microsoft unified communications and collaboration solutions. Axept Webcall recently deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 on-premises to provide updated messaging capabilities to its employees. As a result, it improved its high availability configuration and enhanced communications.

KU Leuven is migrating its administrative and academic staff to Microsoft Lync. This means a central user interface for chatting, e-mail, telephony and videoconferencing via IP network. The software supports their current way of working because users are already very mobile and meet frequently. They can now do so far more efficiently, in the multi-building KUL campus but also from home or abroad. Switching from chat to telephony, sharing documents and starting a video conference is now very rapidly done as and when required. Nextel provides guidance and support to KUL for this extensive migration which is carried out faculty by faculty. All users are expected to be able to communicate via Lync by the end of 2014. Nextel provides advice, technical adaptation and support for the migration.

First Technology is one of South Africa’s leading single-source providers of IT products and solutions. Because email is a business critical tool internally and for its customers, First Technology deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 in its own production environment to understand and experience the latest architecture and capabilities. The deployment will instil confidence in its customers that First Technology can replicate and manage this latest technology.

Parsonage Vandenack Williams LLC (PVW) provides business, tax, and estate planning legal services to companies and their shareholders by combining teamwork, client service, and technology. The firm adopted Microsoft Office 365 to help ensure confidentiality for its clients and to eliminate the cost of purchasing and maintaining on-premises productivity and email environments. Once PVW adopted Office 365, all of its employees immediately downloaded the full version of Microsoft Office 2010 without requiring any training and at no extra cost. Attorneys at PVW use Microsoft Exchange Online to enhance service for their clients and communicate from anywhere at any time. With Office 365, PVW can provide timely service in Nebraska, California, or New York, wherever and whenever its clients need assistance.

With employees located across Australia and New Zealand, Bridgestone Australia wanted to improve its communications capabilities to speed business processes and develop stronger relationships among employees. The company depended on email and phone conversations for the vast majority of its communications and wanted to provide employees with better options for real-time communications. It also had problems with its private-branch exchange systems and needed a new voice solution. Bridgestone chose to deploy Microsoft Lync Server 2013 for voice, conferencing, and instant messaging and presence. The solution has delivered more agile business processes, reduced costs for telephony and travel, and improved sales.

When Volvo IT wanted to implement its Unified Communications Next Generation project, it deployed Microsoft Lync Server 2010 to provide instant messaging, presence, and conferencing capabilities to its employees. With the Lync solution, Volvo IT found it could reduce costs on audio conferencing and mobile roaming. It has also reduced management requirements. To build on the success of the current solution and improve availability, it tested Microsoft Lync Server 2013 as part of the project to prepare for a future deployment.

Türk Telekom Group is a full-service communications and convergence technologies provider in Turkey. The company’s 2,000 retail salespeople used Openwave Messaging to communicate with the corporate office, but the solution was difficult to manage. When Türk Telekom learned about Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, it deployed the solution to help reduce administration, provide high availability, and offer improved messaging capabilities to employees.