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"Don't be a victim of change, be a victor from IT." That advice - along with at least 30 other aphorisms - can be found on the walls at Los Angeles, California-based technology provider SADA Systems. It's tough to know if SADAism #31 is intended for the company's employees or its customers, because SADA applies that advice, with equal success, to both.
One change from which SADA has emerged victorious is the move from self-hosted to managed services. "With the consumerization of IT, business users have greater expectations than ever from corporate IT," says Niv Dolgin, Director of IT Services at SADA Systems. "Corporate IT, meanwhile, wants to meet or exceed those expectations with the least effort and the lowest possible cost."
That was the case when a long-time managed-services customer presented SADA with a challenge. The customer, a technology consulting firm with 35 employees, relied on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 email messaging and collaboration software, hosted by a third-party provider. Although they were already receiving the financial benefits of managed email, the customer wanted to do more to preserve resources during tight economic times.
Could SADA offer a lower cost, without sacrificing availability and reliability? If so, the customer required a highly secure system so that its clients would be comfortable with on-site consultants accessing email through the clients' networks. The customer also wanted instantly variable pricing and scalability so that it could easily add users and know exactly what extending email to those users would cost. Above all, the customer wanted a seamless migration experience for its employees.
SADA was ready. As part of its managed services offerings, SADA offers Microsoft Exchange Online, an Internet-based version of Exchange Server and part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. In contrast to other implementations of Exchange Server, Exchange Online is hosted and managed by Microsoft, which would address the customer's need for reliability and scalability. The service's competitive rate would address the customer's need for a low-cost solution.
As the customer's trusted IT advisor, SADA evaluated a variety of alternative solutions before ultimately recommending Exchange Online. "We zeroed in on what was important to them: they already had Exchange Server and wanted lower cost and greater security," says Edmond Youash, Solutions Specialist at SADA Systems.
Moving to Exchange Online was technically simple, according to Mike Melkonian, Solutions Engineer at SADA Systems. He notes that the work entailed importing a list of existing mailboxes into Exchange Online, setting up permissions, and making modifications to accounts as needed. The migration was implemented over a weekend.
The expertise that SADA provided was crucial. "Cloud migrations usually require a high degree of project management, specifically, change management," says Dolgin. "Here, our biggest added value was planning for user expectations and education. Our guidance helped to ensure that users knew what to expect when Exchange Online was introduced. We explained settings that aren't transferred automatically and how to transfer them. The change management planning, along with Exchange Online itself, contributed to the seamless transition that users told us they experienced."
The SADA customer has reduced costs, increased security, and boosted productivity, all with Exchange Online.
The customer's previous hosting contract was typical for the industry. In addition to paying a monthly rate, the customer paid extra for storage, for connectivity to non-Microsoft devices such as Blackberry phones and for data access and export services. With Exchange Online, the customer achieved significant cost savings and now pays an instantly variable, all-inclusive US$25 per-user each month. The move saved the customer 65 percent of its monthly cost for email, exceeding its expectations.
"In addition to lowering the customer's cost by 65 percent, the flat, per-user pricing for Exchange Online makes the cost for scaling the deployment completely predictable," says Dolgin.
The customer also gained the level of security that makes its own clients more comfortable when on-site consultants use their networks to manage email.
By using Exchange Online, SADA and its customer benefit from email that is based on Microsoft Exchange Server, which has earned a variety of security certifications, including SAS 70 and HIPAA-compliance. The customer can reassure its clients by pointing to those certifications. In addition, the customer can rely on the extensive Microsoft documentation around security and audit practices for email, practices that enhance its own email security.
Although the customer didn't adopt Exchange Online to boost productivity, it is seeing those gains, too. Users can take greater advantage of storage and archiving without worrying about added fees or labor to implement the capabilities. SADA says that it sees fewer email-related service requests from its customer, which means business users are working longer without interruptions or problems.
"Our customer's biggest productivity gains lay ahead of it," says Dolgin. "Because Exchange Online is part of the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, our customer can easily adopt presence, instant messaging, video conferencing, and more."
While Den-Mat is widely recognized as a global cosmetic dentistry leader, their network infrastructure was not adequate for facilitating collaboration amongst its 450-nationwide office staff. Established in 1974 in a highly specialized field, many of Den-Mat's employees were veteran Microsoft Office users with set methodologies. Den-Mat required that their solution be easy to use, have a high user adoption rate and aligned with existing work flows for a seamless but upgraded user experience.
In an effort to increase collaboration and productivity, Den-Mat reached out to SADA Systems to test out Microsoft Online (BPOS). In order to avoid a heavy change management process, SADA Systems was engaged to deliver a Proof of Concept (PoC) that focused supporting a more agile communication system while still providing full functionality and feedback of the suite. SADA systems worked to:
During Den-Mat's Microsoft Online pilot, SADA was able to effectively enhance security and boost productivity. Den-Mat was able to enjoy a greater level of collaboration through the use of LiveMeeting. Thorough demonstrations of LiveMeeting's video conferencing capabilities lead by SADA's technical team, in addition to web console and platform integration, the organization was able to embrace the new technology quickly.
AD Sync (Dir Sync) helped the company conserve IT resources. This tool synchronizes data in the on-premise Active Directory and sends it to the Cloud. With this tool, Den-Mat was able to avoid the need to replicate data creating a seamless feel to the BPOS Suite.
Many of Den-Mat's infrastructure processes were streamlined during the BPOS PoC. SADA assisted Den-Mat's IT department with the criteria for fully evaluating a BPOS platform. Den-Mat was able to properly evaluate how BPOS complied with their needs.
Jonathan Green, Vice President of Information Technologies at DenMat, explains that, "SADA was one of the BEST companies I have had the pleasure of working with. Their communication, understanding, delivery and follow up have been second to none." He looks forward to working with SADA again post-PoC. Green goes on to say that, "While we ultimately needed to stay on-premise for our BPOS needs, SADA's work made the cloud environment easy to understand, integrate with, and ultimately gave us a clear view of our needs."
Since its founding in 1948, Majestic Realty Company has grown to be one of the most influential privately owned commercial real-estate development companies in the United States. Its office, retail and industrial portfolio totals some 70 million square feet, with a focus on industrial parks and sports and entertainment arenas. Among the latter, Majestic Realty is best known for its development of the Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Sparks. Today, the company is working to win approval for a new, privately financed stadium near Los Angeles designed to return professional football to a region that has been without a National Football League team since 1995. Like other successful commercial real-estate businesses, Majestic Realty is led by creative, highly motivated and extroverted individuals who depend heavily on information technology, but are not necessarily infatuated by it. "Most of the executives at Majestic Realty and their administrative assistants have been with the company for 10 or 20 years or more, and they are a driven group of people," says Chris Sandelli, Director of Network Engineering at Majestic Realty. "Like professionals in any industry, they are constantly interacting with email, messaging and applications that manage the data and documents that help them to bring multimillion-dollar projects to fruition, and then manage those projects successfully over the long term. But perhaps more than in other industries, these individuals aren't that interested in the technology itself - they simply want it to work."
Consequently, Sandelli and his seven IT colleagues are committed to ensuring that IT operations run at peak efficiency for the executives, administrators, legal professionals, financial consultants and other business professionals at Majestic Realty. That commitment motivated a 2008 initiative that replaced the firm's on-premises messaging solution with a cloud-based solution, a move that helped the firm save five percent yearly in server-administration costs.
But alongside those savings came a new administrative challenge. For the first time, staffers were using two separate passwords: one password for access to servers on the firm's internal network that runs solutions for customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and other vital operations, and another password for access to services in the Cloud. When Sandelli's team first implemented the cloud solution, they synchronized the update cycle for on-premises passwords with that of the cloud passwords. "But as it turns out, users did not necessarily update both passwords on the same day," Sandelli says. "So for a given individual the update cycles soon became out of synch."
Mobile users were affected even more. "By definition, commercial real-estate professionals spend a lot of time in the field, and on any given day more than ___ percent of Majestic Realty employees are relying on their handheld devices for interacting with clients, vendors, and suppliers," says Jason Tucker, Systems Engineer at Majestic Realty. "Some handheld devices are incapable of receiving notifications regarding password updates, so with two notifications, coming at different times, a mobile employee might easily miss one of them."
As a result, the talented and industrious business professionals at Majestic Realty found it difficult to provide the level of service that the firm's clients had come to rely on. "When clients have a question for an employee at Majestic Realty, they need and expect the answer then and there," Sandelli says. "But if the employee can't access the information required for that answer because of an expired password, for example, then the client has to wait while the employee calls the help desk."
These calls created challenges for the firm's IT professionals as well. "In keeping with our commitment to maintaining an IT environment that runs at peak efficiency for users, when they would call about a password issue, we dropped whatever else we were doing and helped them resolve it," says Cedric Wong, Systems Administer at Majestic Realty. "Considering that on average we received 10 password-related calls per week and spent 15 to 20 minutes to resolve each of them, we devoted nearly three hours every week to this matter. That is time and effort we could have devoted to building new solutions or enhancing existing ones."
To address the password issues at Majestic Realty, Sandelli and his colleagues turned to SADA Systems' AuthMagic for Microsoft Online Services (AMMO) - and found the perfect fit. "We liked the simplicity of AMMO, a server-side solution that synchronizes an on-premises password with a cloud password whenever that password is created or updated," Sandelli says. "We also liked working with SADA Systems, having enjoyed an earlier collaboration with them on an executive-calendaring project."
Sandelli and his colleagues wasted no time in bringing AMMO to Majestic Realty, deploying the product on the firm's on-premises network in just two weeks. As Sandelli reports, the project proceeded without any challenges and was completely transparent to users, and the solution has been running smoothly ever since. "With AMMO, Majestic Realty employees need to manage just one password, which they enter into a single sign-on screen for authentication on the on-premises network as well as on the cloud," he explains. "When it's time for a password update, the new password is mirrored in the Cloud so that it serves as authentication for the on-premises servers and cloud servers alike."
With AMMO in place at Majestic Realty, the firm is enjoying benefits across the board. Business professionals can focus on their work without the distraction of password issues, and IT professionals can focus on enhancement and expansion projects rather than on password-related help-desk calls.
Now that Majestic Realty employees have only one password to remember and update, they can provide better service to existing clients and collaborate more effectively.
"When clients call with a question, our staffers can address that question right away," Sandelli says. "They can access legal documents essential for a pending multimillion-dollar real-estate deal, lease agreements when a property manager calls to report a problem, or invoices when a vendor or supplier needs payment details. Or they can simply reach out to fellow staffers who might be better suited to answer the question. Either way, they can get to the information they need because they can access email and calendars in the Cloud, as well as solutions and databases on the on-premises servers, without encountering an expired or incorrect password."
For Majestic Realty employees in IT, password-related calls to the help desk are down from the 10 calls per week of before, to just one or two - and those one or two calls are resolved in less than a minute each. "We're saving nearly three hours each week on help-desk calls, time that we can devote to more value-added projects," Sandelli reports. Such projects include upgrades to the firm's appliance storage system, expansion of its use of virtualization, enhancements to database and collaboration solutions, and research into the use of the Windows Azure platform, the Microsoft cloud services development, hosting, and management environment.
"Having resolved our password issues with the help of AMMO, we can focus our efforts on projects that will make the most of our firm's IT investments," Sandelli says. "At the same time, we are helping the business professionals at Majestic Realty do what they do best: deliver value to our clients."
Psomas is a mid-sized engineering firm that provides a broad range of services, including planning, land surveying and construction management to clients in both the private and public sectors. The company, which has been ranked by Engineering News Record magazine as one of the top design and engineering firms in the nation, has 11 offices in central and southern California, Arizona, and Utah.
With personnel scattered across a wide geographic region, Psomas relies heavily on its messaging and communications tools to drive its information-intensive business. For a number of years, the company used Microsoft Exchange 2007 as the backbone of its messaging infrastructure. However, by early 2010, company executives recognized that they would need a solution that could better meet the ever-increasing scalability and reliability demands of daily operations. They also wanted to boost the communications features available to a large and growing mobile workforce using a variety of devices, including Blackberries, Windows Phones and iPhones.
As the company evaluated alternatives that could provide a more powerful messaging solution, it considered doing an upgrade on-premises, but due to changes in internal personnel, the IT team felt it did not have the resources or experience to take on such a mission-critical project on its own. Of particular concern was the potential impact to Psomas users; the IT team and company executives wanted to ensure the least amount of disruption during deployment of a new messaging infrastructure. The company decided to find a partner that could help recommend, design, and implement a new messaging solution.
Psomas decided to partner with SADA Systems, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that provides technology consulting, outsourcing and application development services focusing on cloud solutions. One of SADA's specializations is Microsoft Online Services and the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), the solution that Psomas decided to use for its upgraded messaging infrastructure. BPOS includes Microsoft Exchange Online for email and calendaring; Microsoft SharePoint Online for portals; Microsoft Office Communications Online, which delivers presence technology, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer audio calls; and Office Live Meeting for web and video conferencing.
"We decided on BPOS because it would provide more mobile collaboration capabilities in the Cloud and a highly robust, scalable messaging platform," says Sherri Bayer, IT Manager for Psomas. "This would help our push to deliver better, richer communications features to our mobile workforce, while reducing demands for physical storage and the IT staff resources needed to maintain our email system."
Psomas chose to work with SADA Systems because of the partner's expertise in online solutions, including the BPOS suite. Planning for the new messaging solution began in mid-2010, and deployment started in September 2010. Deployment of the basic components was completed in about one month, and all modifications were finalized by before the end of the year.
BPOS provides an enterprise-class and highly redundant platform that is well suited for the vastly mobile Psomas workforce allowing users to meet the company's communications needs while ensuring 99.9% uptime for all communication. The deployment of a cloud-based solution is also helping Psomas control its administrative overhead while still providing necessary features to end users like Live Meeting and SharePoint Online to improve daily productivity.
Working with SADA Systems to deploy the Microsoft BPOS solution helped Psomas upgrade its messaging infrastructure in a third of the time it would take to complete an upgrade in house. Bayer says the decision to work with SADA Systems resulted in a fast, efficient deployment that quickly began delivering benefits to Psomas. "Overall, the deployment went quite smoothly," says Bayer. "Obviously there are always going to be technical issues that arise during the course of deploying a mission-critical system such as this. But SADA Systems understood our needs, they had a highly detailed deployment plan, and were very responsive to any questions and concerns that arose during the deployment process."
The solution quickly began delivering tangible business results. "Within months of deploying the BPOS tools, we were able to start saving on the physical storage costs as well as the IT staff time required to maintain an email system," says Bayer. "We anticipate that over the long term, we will save a lot through the use of these tools. We've also experienced faster, more efficient communications with employees out in the field, which is helping to reduce or eliminate time delays in getting information to customers."
The solution quickly began delivering tangible business results. "Within months of deploying the BPOS tools, we were able to start saving on the physical storage costs as well as the IT staff time required to maintain an email system," says Bayer. "We anticipate that over the long term, we will save a lot through the use of these tools. We've also experienced faster, more efficient communications with employees out in the field, which is helping to reduce or eliminate time delays in getting information to customers."