Today’s guest blogger is Mo Khan, managing director of Xelleration, a consulting and technology solutions company and a Microsoft Gold Certified partner that provides business intelligence and office automation solutions. Headquartered in Irvine, Calif., the firm works with businesses of all sizes across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. 

Over the past couple of years, we’ve watched a slow but steady stream of companies move to the cloud. Like any transformation, cloud-based computing is an evolution that comes in small spurts. We at Xelleration educate our customers about the cloud every day. And while security and trust are still a top concern for people, I believe we are turning the corner. Over the next few years, there’s going to be a tremendous push toward the cloud both because of the economies of scale and price-performance improvements it offers.

Already, we have moved several clients to Microsoft Office 365, and many more are slated to migrate over the next six months. Many of the larger companies we’ve worked with have opted for a hybrid approach to the cloud. Some of these customers are global companies with a distributed workforce that want to transition to the cloud gradually. Others, including some of the defense contractors we work with, want to take a hybrid approach for security and privacy reasons. Unlike Google Apps, Office 365 offers a hybrid approach to the cloud, making it the best choice for any organization that wants to transition to the cloud in phases or permanently keep some of its workloads on-premise.

If customers have questions about the difference in various offerings out there, we usually point them to the Gartner Magic Quadrants and market scope reports, which are among the many comparative analyses that have identified Microsoft at the top. As the Magic Quadrant reports show, Microsoft is rated as a leader in all key enterprise capabilities. By comparison, Google only shows up in one category. We also direct customers to media reports such as the recent column published in Information Week called “Google Enterprise: I’m not Impressed.” Customers usually need no more validation.

In some cases, we’ve switched customers to Office 365 because of the limitations they were running into with Google Apps. One customer wanted more integration with Microsoft Office, which presented some challenges with Google Apps. Others wanted to automate business workflows that would have required custom development in Google Apps. While we’ve switched Google customers to Microsoft, I don’t know of any organizations using Office 365 that want to move to Google Apps.

Increased Productivity, Reduced Costs
Xelleration itself made the transition to Office 365 at the end of 2011, and it’s just incredible how it has helped to increase our efficiency. We have fewer hardware and maintenance needs, and we no longer have to worry about installing software patches or updates, or keeping our system safe from computer viruses.

Another benefit is that Office 365 has significantly reduced our travel costs. With Lync Online, we now hold most of our meetings via videoconferences. Over the past year alone, this has saved thousands of dollars in travel costs, and Xelleration is a small company with about 60 employees. Imagine how much a business with thousands of employees can save. It’s just phenomenal.

Hands down, Office 365 is a great investment for organizations of all sizes–both in terms of increasing productivity and reducing costs.

As retailers head to the National Retail Federation Annual Convention and EXPO this year, most, I’m sure, have already heard the forecasts for continued slow growth in 2013.

As one industry professional put it: Growth will be “challenging” and underlying economic conditions “uncertain.” Overall, Moody’s predicts that real U.S. growth domestic product will grow by a sluggish 2 percent in 2013, roughly the same pace as in 2012.

To remain competitive in this environment, retail companies need to do everything in their power to cut costs, maximize employee productivity, and strengthen customer service.

Office 365: The Sure Advantage
Since the introduction of Office 365, a broad range of retailers have selected Microsoft’s cloud-based software for just these reasons. Retailers of all shapes and sizes are choosing Office 365 to give themselves a competitive edge over their peers–from department store owners to automobile retailers to companies selling electronics, groceries, or clothing.

Among the benefits they are reaping:

• Improved employee communication and collaboration–Unlike competitive solutions like Google Apps, Microsoft enables companies to take a hybrid approach to the cloud, allowing them to continue leveraging their on-premise investments, while reaping the benefits of the cloud. By taking a hybrid approach, retailers have a cost-effective way of connecting their desk-less workers to the rest of the enterprise–improving communication and collaboration across the company.

  Toyota Motor Corporation decided to implement Office 365 as part of a hybrid solution to better support mobile devices, reduce costs, and improve collaboration among employees. Says Shigeki Tomoyama, managing officer at Toyota: “We strongly believe that Microsoft has the most capable platform that delivers ease, excellence and efficiency required to provide the communication experience our employees expect.”

  By choosing Office 365, retail companies also have access to SharePoint Online, a powerful platform for communicating and collaborating across the company.
  Using SharePoint Online, for example, the Brazilian department store chain Lojas Renner has been able to collect comments from managers on upcoming collections. This, in turn, has increased employees' engagement with the brand, while also improving the company's products.

  "By giving our managers a chance to influence our future collections, they gain a sense of ownership," says Leandro Balbinot, Chief Information Officer at Lojas Renner. "And it helps us better meet customer needs by incorporating input from the employees who work directly with them."

• Better customer service–SharePoint also offers a powerful way for retailers to deliver top-level customer service. Because SharePoint serves as a searchable central repository for company information, retail workers can easily access the right information at the right time, answering customer questions on the spot. They can also connect with experts within the company, helping customers to quickly find answers to their most difficult questions.

  For example, Tesco, one of the world’s largest retailers, plans to use Office 365 as a portal that enables employees, suppliers, and colleagues to engage with each other and deliver a great shopping experience. “Office 365 will enable us to be a fully connected organization that works closely together, proactively shares knowledge, motivates loyalty and retention of employees, and encourages better working practices to ensure that we create value for customers,”says Mike McNamara, Tesco’s chief information officer.

  Likewise, electrical retailer Dixons Retail is planning to roll out Office 365 to its 20,000 employees across the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, and the Czech Republic–with the goal of making it easier to contact individuals and circulate messages en-masse throughout the organization. To achieve this goal, the company plans to use cloud-based Office versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync to aid staff collaboration and support flexible working.

  “It is crucial that we continue to be progressive in how we deliver service,” says Matt Horwood, the company’s IT director. “Office 365 will not only increase the amount of time that our staff can spend on the shop floor, but also arm them with the right information to serve customers effectively."

• Improved accessibility for remote workers–A key benefit of Office 365 is that it can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection. And unlike Google Apps, which has limited offline functionality, employees using Office 365 can continue to be fully productive even when there’s no Internet access.

  One retailer that rolled out Office 365 to improve remote worker access is luxury audio and video systems maker Bang & Olufsen. With about three-quarters of its 2,000 employees working remotely, the company needed a way for its staff to access email from any device including smartphones, remote PCs, and other mobile devices.
   
  Says Ole Damsgaard, senior director of IT & Shared Service Centre at Bang & Olufsen: “It was easy to integrate Office 365 into our existing work environment and for our workers to start using it right away because they already know the tools. And now, everybody who has a smartphone can very easily access their emails and calendars.”

  Hallmark Cards, the largest creator of greeting cards in the United States, also deployed Office 365 partly as a way to better integrate its 9,500 employees from around the world. “The decision to move to Office 365 is part of a broader strategy to provide an integrated, unified platform to increase productivity and connect our employees across the globe,” says Tony Marshall, director of Enterprise Architecture at Hallmark.

• Reduced IT, training and travel costs–Office 365 can be a big money saver for retailers. Companies can reduce the capital cost of purchasing hardware and software while decreasing the administrative costs of maintaining an IT environment. Using Lync Online, they can reduce travel costs by making it possible to hold high-quality online meetings. And because Office 365 is based on the Office tools most employees are already familiar with, the need for training is minimal.

  Among the retail companies that have reduced costs using Office 365 is fashion retailer Otto Japan. Since the company upgraded its email system to Exchange Online, officials estimate that administrative man-hours have decreased by approximately 30 percent. The company considered Google Apps but in the end chose Office 365. “Speed and ease of use were essential,” says Nobuhiko Kita of the information systems department at Otto Japan.

  Similarly, the premier fashion designer BCBGMAXAZRIAGROUP adopted Office 365 to replace large capital purchases with a more manageable cost model. In doing so, BCBG can now add or delete subscriptions as needed and pay for what it uses on a monthly basis, without a large capital investment. What’s more, the company doesn’t have to support separate software for web conferencing or its almost 600 BlackBerry mobile devices, which will reduce its licensing and IT management costs.

  “We can use Office 365 to build a roadmap to long-term cost savings instead of paying up to [US] $300,000 in up-front expenses,” says Kent Fuller, Director of IT Infrastructure Services. 

  By moving to Office 365, the global retailer Helly Hansen has been better able to connect its employees working across continents. Holding videoconferences via Lync Online, managers expect to reduce travel costs by 10 to 15 percent in 2013. “For the IT team, which is spread over five countries, being able to have all of our meetings online has been an amazing transformation,” says Sandy Abrahams, IT director at Helly Hansen. “Now that we can see each other and share our desktops, we can lead more productive meetings and benefit from closer relationships.”

Recognizing a Good Thing
As goes the retail industry, so goes the global economy. In the U.S. alone, for example, retailers operate more than 3.6 million establishments, and contribute $2.5 trillion to the gross domestic product.
 
Particularly in an environment in which growth is slow and competition is tight, choosing the right productivity software can make the difference between a retailer that thrives versus one that loses out to its competitors.

No wonder so many retailers are embracing Office 365 as their secret weapon. If anyone knows a great product when they see one, it’s the retail industry.

To learn more, please see “Retailers Weather Economic Storms in the Cloud with Office 365” blog post.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.

jcpenney Aims for the Cloud with Microsoft Office 365
With 1,000 stores in all 50 U.S. states, retailer jcpenney moves to Office 365 to enhance collaboration among its workers.

Tesco signs up to use Microsoft Office 365
Tesco, the UK's largest retailer and one of the world's leading international retailers, chooses Office 365 to serve as a portal for all Tesco employees, suppliers and colleagues.

Helly Hansen Makes the Switch to Office 365
Global outdoor brand Helly Hansen chooses Office 365 as a way to cut costs, and improve communication and collaboration among its 350 full-time employees on five continents.

HIPAA 101: Universities Use Office 365 To Meet Regs
A number of top universities have opted for Office 365 as a way to meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements.

The New Office Expands Free Support for Multiple Languages
The new Office will dramatically improve support for international users and multiple languages.

Microsoft Lync Moves to the 'Must-Have' List
In today’s fully connected world, Lync has moved to the must-have list for businesses of any size or industry.

8 Key Changes In Microsoft SharePoint 2013
Microsoft makes a number of social- and mobile-friendly changes to SharePoint 2013, ringing in “another significant phase of the platform's continuing evolution.”

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.

The Windy City Teams with Microsoft on Cloud Strategy
The City of Chicago moves 30,000 employees to Office 365, joining a growing number of state and local governments that are taking advantage of the cost savings and efficiency benefits of the Microsoft cloud.

Seeking Productivity via Office 365
GAVS Technologies, a leading player in the global IT services and solutions delivery market, selects Office 365 over Google Apps for its “24x7 expert phone support, native integration between solutions, enterprise class reliability and the familiar Office user interface.

Microsoft Researchers Look Back at 2012
As 2012 wraps up, Microsoft Research New England summarizes its accomplishments over the past year.

Windows 8 Market Share Jumped in December
December was a good month for Windows 8, with Microsoft's new platform gaining ground at the expense of Apple's OS X platform.

C# Named Top Programming Language of 2012
Microsoft's C# programming language earns the rank of the No. 1 programming language of 2012.

Today’s guest blogger is André Henrique Buss, owner of GW Computadores, a technology consulting firm that specializes in cloud-based infrastructures. Headquartered in Blumenau, Brazil, the firm works with small- and medium-size businesses in Brazil.

Today, there really isn’t a good reason for small- and medium-size businesses not to migrate to the cloud. And those that make the change sooner rather than later will gain a competitive advantage over other companies in their industry.

All of our clients are very interested in cloud technologies. Many of them work with larger competitors that have impressive IT infrastructures. The cloud enables a company with a single employee to use the same tools as a large, multinational corporation. It levels the playing field by giving smaller companies a powerful tool at a price that fits their budgets.

Office 365: The Right Choice for Our Clients
We always show our clients both Office 365 and Google Apps before the sale, and they always choose Office 365. The first question our customers ask is about support. They want to know what assistance they’ll receive should they run into technical problems. And they’re concerned about the level of support that Google offers. For example, Google only offers an international phone number with support in English for Brazilian customers, which is often a deal breaker. It does not offer support in Brazilian Portuguese, making it difficult to get answers to questions. In addition, our customers are concerned about the confidentiality of their information. With Google Apps, they don’t know where their information gets stored or how it will be handled.

The compatibility of Office 365 with other Office products is also an advantage. Most of our clients have used Office software for a long time and are intimately familiar with it. Since Office 365 offers the same intuitive look and feel as desktop versions of Office, there’s very little training required. Instead, employees can simply open up their email and their files, and begin working. Our clients really like tools like SharePoint and Lync, which help them to communicate and collaborate just like a large company would. While Google Apps offers some of the same functionality, it feels more bare bones.

IT administrators also find they are more productive with Office 365. They like the fact that they no longer have to worry about software patches or maintaining complex servers. And they love the additional storage capacity that they get with the cloud. Their budgets are being freed up for more strategic purposes. For example, the additional hardware that was once required for backup and auditing tasks is no longer a topic of discussion at budget meetings. And IT teams that were once busy keeping the infrastructure up and running can shift their focus to improving user interaction with products, which benefits the entire company.

Office 365: The Right Choice for Us
We at GW Computadores have used Office since we first began operating in 2001, and our own productivity continues to grow with each new version. We moved to the Microsoft cloud with Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) when it was first introduced, and our productivity increased even further after upgrading to Office 365. Our employees use Office 365 from their Windows Phones, which enables them to stay productive while on the road or wherever they are. And we’ve adopted Lync Online as our standard for meetings, which allows us to easily communicate and collaborate without the expense of traveling. Our own day-to-day experience with Office 365 has been phenomenal, and we always recommend it to customers.