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Microsoft Office 365 Customer Solution Case Study0381000Fire-Safety Firm Expects to Reduce Costs by 36 percent with Cloud-Based SolutionOverviewCountry or Region: GermanyIndustry: Professional ServicesCustomer Profilehhpberlin provides fire-safety consulting for large construction projects around the world. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, it employs 110 workers.Business Situationhhpberlin wanted to examine if cloud-based services would help reduce long-term costs while supporting growth and employee productivity.SolutionThe company decided to transition its services to the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 solution, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Professional Plus.BenefitsAvoid hardware and consulting costsReduce IT administration and deployment costsStrengthen security and reliabilityImprove flexibility and compliance of licensingAvoid employee downtime“We expect Office 365 to help reduce IT costs by 36 percent. As one of the first in our industry to take advantage of hosted services, we will have both a costs and a competitive advantage.”Stefan Truth?n, Chief Information Officer, hhpberlinhhpberlin is one of the largest fire-safety consultancies in the world. The IT staff previously deployed Microsoft Office 2010 and several 2010 Microsoft server applications to help employees improve communication and collaboration. As the firm grew, it wanted to see whether cloud-based services would help reduce costs while supporting growth and employee productivity. hhpberlin joined the Microsoft Office 365 Rapid Deployment Program to test Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online. After a short pilot, it decided to obtain an Office 365 enterprise subscription license plan, which includes Microsoft Office Professional Plus and enables it to use its on-premises Microsoft server solutions in conjunction with cloud-based services. With Office 365, the company expects to reduce IT costs by 36 percent and improve reliability as it continues to grow.Situationhhpberlin provides fire consultancy services during the design, building, and operations phases of projects that range from office buildings to stadiums and airports. The company’s 110 employees are spread across five office locations in Germany. Since hhpberlin was founded in 2000, it has experienced steady growth and become a market leader as one of the largest and most innovative fire-safety consultancies in the world. As a professional services firm, hhpberlin believes its people and their knowledge are its primary assets. By deploying Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and Microsoft Lync Server 2010, the company’s IT staff enabled the communication and collaboration solutions that employees needed to serve global clients on complex projects. With this Microsoft environment, the company used Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 to deliver what it called the Project Center solution, which helped increase revenue from its inspectors by 10 to 25 percent by reducing how much time they spent documenting projects. Stefan Truth?n, Chief Information Officer at hhpberlin, explains, “The Microsoft platform was critical to our ability to share knowledge across experts, improve customer service, and increase project execution.” As evidence of this productivity boost, in the last year, hhpberlin revenues grew by €1 million (U.S.$1,422,000) and project workloads increased by 50 percent. [Click here to read more about how hhpberlin expects 10 Percent Revenue Gain with Office 2010.]hhpberlin reduced IT costs by standardizing on a Microsoft environment, but it expects that administration costs and hardware costs will continue to grow as the company expands. It wanted to examine whether cloud-based services would help reduce long-term costs and improve reliability of its infrastructure while supporting growth and employee productivity. Because hhpberlin operates a single data center, it was also interested in geographic redundancy and backups of critical project data that a cloud-based service could provide.5403852023745“With Office 365, the employee experience does not change. It just happens to be hosted by Microsoft, which relieves the administrative burden and hardware dependencies.”Stefan Truth?n, Chief Information Officer, hhpberlin00“With Office 365, the employee experience does not change. It just happens to be hosted by Microsoft, which relieves the administrative burden and hardware dependencies.”Stefan Truth?n, Chief Information Officer, hhpberlinhhpberlin reached out to Microsoft to learn about Microsoft Office 365, the next-generation communications and collaboration cloud-based services from Microsoft. Office 365 combines the familiar Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online. Truth?n says, “Office 365 appeared to be the only hosted services solution that would allow us to transition services to the cloud at our own pace, while still taking advantage of all the great capabilities in Office 2010 and Microsoft server solutions that we already have in production.”Solutionhhpberlin joined the Microsoft Office 365 Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) to test the cloud-based solutions. The hhpberlin IT staff easily moved 20 percent of its employees to online services through the Office 365 portal. The pilot team tested all of the Office 365 services, which include Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Microsoft Office Professional Plus. “We switched employees from on-premises servers to Office 365 services in a few clicks, with no downtime for our employees. They required no additional training to get started since they are already familiar with Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync. We also did not need any new hardware or consulting to help with deployment or backup and disaster recovery procedures,” says Truth?n. First, the company asked the pilot team to test key business processes in Office 365 that they perform daily through their current on-premises Microsoft solutions. The pilot team tested the following communication and collaboration scenarios: Performing project execution and knowledge sharing with Microsoft OneNote 2010 team notebooks stored in SharePoint OnlineAccessing offline SharePoint Online content in Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 for mobile productivity of its onsite inspectorsResponding faster to customers by using email and calendar capabilities such as Conversation View, Calendar Preview, and Voice Mail-to-Text Preview through Exchange Online, Microsoft Outlook 2010, Microsoft Outlook Web Apps, and Microsoft Outlook Mobile from their Windows Phone 7 devicesConnecting to coworkers through Microsoft Lync 2010 and Lync Online and testing capabilities such as presence and instant messaging, PC-to-PC calling, and conferencingTruth?n says, “Most of our business processes are enabled by Office 2010 as the primary employee interface to Exchange, SharePoint and Lync capabilities. With Office 365, the employee experience does not change. It just happens to be hosted by Microsoft, which relieves the administrative burden and hardware dependencies. Even if our Internet connection goes down for a few hours, the risk is low to our business, because we still have offline access to our SharePoint files in SharePoint Workspace and offline access to our email and calendar in Outlook.”After the company completed the pilot project, the IT staff concluded that Office 365 would meet its long-term needs. The company will transition its applicable Microsoft licenses from traditional volume licenses to an Office 365 subscription service plan that includes Office Professional Plus on the desktop. This licensing arrangement provides the flexibility for hhpberlin to transition to cloud-based solutions on its own schedule because it provides licensing rights for on-premises solutions, which includes its Lync Server enterprise voice deployment.To begin the transition, hhpberlin will move the pilot mailboxes permanently to Exchange Online, followed by the rest of the employee mailboxes. To maintain the benefits hhpberlin receives from its on-premises SharePoint Server and Lync Server deployments in conjunction with its cloud-based services, the IT staff deployed Active Directory Federation Services to manage the identification of users across the servers and services. Truth?n says, “The user experience is seamless when employees are working with Exchange Online in conjunction with on-premises solutions like SharePoint Server and Lync Server. Employees do not know whether they are in the cloud or not; and they don’t care, as long as it works.” Employees can still view presence information in email messages and can access the rich contact card to initiate a chat or phone call.Benefitshhpberlin trusts Microsoft as its partner to host critical communication and collaboration services in the cloud. The company expects the Office 365 hosted solution, which includes the subscription for Office Professional Plus, to help it control IT costs as the company continues to grow. Truth?n says, “We expect Office 365 to help reduce IT costs by 36 percent. As one of the first in our industry to take advantage of hosted services, we will have a competitive advantage from both a cost perspective and due to the advanced collaboration capabilities.” In his analysis, Truth?n included cost estimates for hardware, software, administration, and deployment related to its communication and collaboration platform over the next six years. 5588002057400 00 Avoid Hardware and Consulting CostsBy moving to Office 365, hhpberlin expects to avoid hardware and consulting costs. For example, it spent approximately €100,000 [U.S.$141,000] in the last two years on hardware to support its deployment of SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, and Lync Server. As the company transitions from on-premises to Office 365, it will avoid hardware costs for future deployments. Truth?n says, “As we move to Office 365, our existing servers will not be retired. The hardware will be repurposed to our high-performance computing environment, which we need for fire-safety engineers to perform complex calculations on building designs.”Reduce IT Administration and Deployment Costs5553604339543Figure 1. Cost Comparison Chart – Annual Costs00Figure 1. Cost Comparison Chart – Annual CostsWith the company’s recent growth, the amount of time IT staff spent on administrative tasks supporting the desktop and server environments had increased to approximately 70 percent of their day. With the majority of these administrative responsibilities moving to the hosted data center resources at Microsoft, the IT staff at hhpberlin expects to have 50 percent more time to support business-focused projects that help the company continue its revenue growth. This time savings equates to at least one full-time employee or €56,000 [U.S.$79,000] in yearly operation costs. Truth?n says, “Office 365 will help us maintain our current IT staff level while our employee base, office locations, and customers increase. The IT staff does not fear this change; they embrace it because it will create opportunities for them to spend more time supporting employees and leading business-focused IT projects.”For example, after hhpberlin moves all services online, when a new employee joins the company, the IT administrator will create a new directory account in Active Directory. Then, with one additional click, the employee will be connected to Office 365. All the other activities, including security, uptime, backup, and disaster recovery, will be managed and maintained by Microsoft at the data center. “This will free up time for my IT staff to focus on hhpberlin business activities, not server administration,” says Truth?n.hhpberlin will also significantly decrease vendor costs from consulting fees to help deploy, upgrade, and update software for its on-premises applications. Truth?n says, “Since the experts at Microsoft will handle most of our daily maintenance for us in the hosted environment, hhpberlin expects a cost avoidance of €5,000 to €40,000 [U.S.$7,110 to $56,875] per deployment project.”Strengthen Security and ReliabilityWith Office 365, hhpberlin takes advantage of premium antispam and antivirus protection, geo-redundant data centers, twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week IT-level phone support, and a financially backed, 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement. Truth?n adds, “We are confident Microsoft has the resources to protect our data in the cloud and provide us with more robust security and reliability than we can do ourselves.”5403852023745“Office 365 will help us maintain our current IT staff level while our employee base, office locations, and customers increase.”Stefan Truth?n, Chief Information Officer, hhpberlin00“Office 365 will help us maintain our current IT staff level while our employee base, office locations, and customers increase.”Stefan Truth?n, Chief Information Officer, hhpberlinImprove Flexibility and Compliance of Licensinghhpberlin gains more control of its IT with the flexibility and management of the Office 365 subscription-based licensing model. The pay-as-you-go monthly service enables the IT staff to easily comply with its licenses by scaling the subscription as employees are hired or leave the company. Truth?n says, “Even though we are a smaller company, we have faced challenges managing licenses in the past. With Office 365, our license costs are more predictable and scalable as we grow our business. The per-employee subscription method is also easy to pay—similar to a monthly cell phone bill. Plus our IT staff can better manage license compliance and ensure we only pay for the capacity and services we need.”As hhpberlin transitions its solutions to Office 365, the IT staff can create more flexible deployment plans. Whether it transitions employees to cloud services such as SharePoint Online or Lync Online a few at a time or all at once, IT can choose to run both hosted services and on-premises solutions. Truth?n says, “With Office 365, we will move to cloud services at our own pace. As we transition employees and services, the IT staff can control our infrastructure and run the business with the administrative capabilities provided.” This flexibility also allows hhpberlin to pay for licenses based on employees’ job descriptions. For example, hhpberlin can provide a college intern with a license for a less expensive plan that is sufficient for the job. If the intern is hired full-time, the IT staff can quickly move them to the same enterprise plan that the rest of the company subscribes to with Office 365.Avoid Employee DowntimeDuring the transition to Exchange Online, IT staff reported zero support calls from employees related to communication downtime or delays in project execution. Truth?n says, “Since our employees see the same Outlook 2010 interface, we experienced no lapses in email communication. Keeping our employees productive and in touch with our customers is critical to our revenue model and IT strategy.”hhpberlin trusts Microsoft to help lead the way to a cost-effective cloud-based solution that will help its employees be more productive. Truth?n concludes, “We are confident in Microsoft’s experience, resources, and skills to securely host our critical communication and collaboration services. Our participation in the Office 365 RDP program enabled us to be one of the first to move to Office 365 in our industry. Since innovative technology solutions are a strong selling point, we expect to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace as we transition to Office 365.”28587707144385Software and ServicesMicrosoft Office 365Microsoft Exchange OnlineMicrosoft Lync OnlineMicrosoft SharePoint OnlineMicrosoft Office Professional PlusMicrosoft Office 2010Microsoft Lync 2010Microsoft OneNote 2010Microsoft Outlook 2010Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010Microsoft Server Product PortfolioMicrosoft Exchange Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft Lync Server 2010TechnologiesActive Directory Federation Services00Software and ServicesMicrosoft Office 365Microsoft Exchange OnlineMicrosoft Lync OnlineMicrosoft SharePoint OnlineMicrosoft Office Professional PlusMicrosoft Office 2010Microsoft Lync 2010Microsoft OneNote 2010Microsoft Outlook 2010Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010Microsoft Server Product PortfolioMicrosoft Exchange Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft Lync Server 2010TechnologiesActive Directory Federation Services5549908255000This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 201100This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 20115403852056765For 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:For more information about hhpberlin products and services, call (49) (30) 895955-0 or visit the website at: hhpberlin.de 00For 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:For more information about hhpberlin products and services, call (49) (30) 895955-0 or visit the website at: hhpberlin.de 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 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: ................
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