Customer Solution Case Study
/ IT Services Firm Improves Communications and Collaboration, Reduces Costs with Online Service
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Professional Services
Customer Profile
Unilog Content Solutions is a global technology company specializing in ‘Big Data’ Analytics and Product Data Management for e-commerce enterprises. Through its product suites XRF2 and CIMM2, Unilog provides a host of services and solutions for suppliers, buyers, and e-businesses worldwide.
Business Situation
Unilog Content Solutions decided to replace its multiple POP accounts and freeware CRM solution with a truly unified online communication system to improve reliability and communications while reducing costs.
Solution
Unilog Content Solutions opted for cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 to broaden its communication capabilities at minimal CapEx and OpEx.
Benefits
· Improves productivity
· Reduces costs and administration
· Increases reliability with uninterrupted communication
· Speeds decision-making, provides competitive advantage / “Employee productivity has improved significantly…. We reckon there has been a 10 to 12 percent improvement in productivity on iterative tasks.”
Suchit Bachalli, Vice President, Sales, Unilog Content Solutions Pvt Ltd
Unilog, a global technology company, provides a comprehensive range of products and content solutions for clients worldwide. However, with growth, the company outgrew its existing solutions, resulting in significant downtimes, lost emails, repetitive data entry, and mobile access limitations. Unilog evaluated hosted solutions from Google, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft but finally adopted Microsoft Office 365, the next generation of cloud-based communication and collaboration services. With Office 365, Unilog significantly improved the reliability of its messaging system, document sharing, and communication capabilities. The company reduced costs and administration while also providing the latest capabilities to help its employees communicate more effectively. It can now synchronize emails across multiple devices that improve productivity and decision-making capabilities.
Situation
Established in 1998, Unilog Content Solutions Pvt Ltd is a leading global technology and services company specializing in ‘Big Data’ Analytics and Product Data Management fore-commerce. As part of its services portfolio, Unilog classifies, cleanses, and enriches content, and readies it for e-commerce applications. The ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 8000 certified company employs more than 300 people in its Bangalore, Mysore, and Philadelphia facilities.
Unilog has built an ecosystem of customers and partners, which includes several Fortune 500 companies belonging to diverse industry segments such as electrical, electronics, general retail, industrial safety, life sciences and lab supply, office supplies, IT, and more.
Unilog was using POP (post office protocol) based, shared/hosted email services and had started facing numerous business challenges from its existing messaging solutions, including unexpected downtimes. Multiple accounts resulted in decentralized emails with limited monitoring. This resulted in countless delays. Very often, time-sensitive, mission critical emails would not even reach intended recipients. These problems were directly affecting business performance.
Moreover, with increasing demand, the team was experiencing problems in maintaining a higher mailbox quota. Lokesh R, IT Manager, Unilog Content Solutions recalls, “With shared and hosted POP accounts, we were not able to meet the demands for larger mailboxes. We were neither able to control downtime nor delays in email communication, resulting in inefficiency and business delays.”
The IT team also had to spend time to manage updates, patches, and third-party solutions deployed to control security and spam.
For Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Unilog was using a freeware application called vTiger. Its web version was, not effective for a services organization such as Unilog. Employees in remote locations found the web interface inefficient and slow. Also, it did not have features and options on managing leads, accounts, opportunities, and invoice processing.
Microsoft CRM, on the other hand, has user-friendly report dashboards and we manage weekly reports with much ease, a key role on Unilog sales cycle.
Since vTiger did not integrate with Microsoft Office or the messaging solutions, employees were constantly behind in handling data. Other issues included limitations on field sizes for entering data and the lack of a robust data export feature. All of this led Unilog to look at alternatives.
Solution
Unilog evaluated multiple options available in the market, among which were Google Apps, ZDNet mails, Zimbra for Exchange, Salesforce.com for CRM, and also Microsoft offerings. It quickly decided to focus on truly unified but hosted communication system solutions to manage applications with a minimal impact on the budget.
With a hosted solution, it hoped to lower IT administration costs and avoid capital expenses of an on-premises solution. When it learnt about Microsoft Office 365, the next generation of Microsoft online services, it realized its potential. Office 365 combines Microsoft Office applications with the power of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online into one connected, online solution.
In October 2011, Unilog decided to move from its existing environment to Office 365 cloud-based services. “Microsoft is a global and reliable brand, and Office 365 takes Microsoft’s productivity tools online, from email to collaboration and communications services to any desktop with ease,” says Ramachandra Raje Urs, General Manager, Operations, Unilog Content Solutions.
Unilog worked with Microsoft Partner Acropetal Technologies to implement Exchange Online, Lync Online, and SharePoint Online. Lokesh R adds, “Overall, we were very pleased with the implementation experience. Both Microsoft and Acropetal teams were responsive and completed the implementation in just three days.”
Users now have a large mailbox storage capacity of 25 GB for their email, calendar, and contacts in one place, accessed via Outlook Web Apps.
Microsoft Lync Online provides improved functionality and robust services for instant messaging, audio/video calling between PCs, and web conferencing. In fact, employees can access Lync from the Outlook Web App to schedule or attend voice or video calls.
In addition, Unilog is also deploying Dynamics CRM Online. “The close integration between Dynamics CRM Online and Outlook Web Apps gives employees the ability to update CRM activities from within Outlook. This is the reason we chose it over Salesforce.com,” states Suchit Bachalli, Vice President, Sales, Unilog Content Solutions. “We have successfully implemented the sales module and are in the process of adopting the same for services and marketing teams.”
The company is in the process of deploying SharePoint Online. Unilog believes it to be an excellent tool for document management and collaboration. It allows two or more users to edit a document simultaneously. “We intend to use it optimally going forward,” says Suchit Bachalli. “It will allow us to manage documents offline and help us synchronize back to the server when reconnected.”
Benefits
Suchit Bachalli continues, “Since we have implemented Office 365, we have had no downtime.” With Lync Online, real time communication and scheduling web conferences and online meetings have become a simple process.
Improves Productivity
“Office 365 is truly a game changer. It saves time and resources, delivering real time updated information to managers,” explains Suchit Bachalli. The time spent in managing emails or retrieving lost emails is now a thing of past. Instant messages, quick answers, and online document editing saves a significant number of hours on a daily basis.
Multiple points of data entry are consolidated in CRM Online, eliminating time spent on data entry and retrieving relevant information to create reports.
“Employee productivity has significantly improved. While we are still in the process of measuring it, we reckon there has been a 10 to 12 percent improvement in productivity on iterative tasks,” states Suchit Bachalli.
Reduces Costs and Administration
The transition to Office 365 reduced costs in multiple areas, thus lowering the total cost of ownership. The capital expenditure is negligible and the per user operating costs are well within the organization’s budget. “The solution really delivers reliability and scalability on the cloud, and once the budget is allocated, there are no hidden costs,” says Vatsal Poddar, Vice Chairman, Unilog. He emphasizes, “Microsoft manages and maintains the cloud solution, thus reducing administration, maintenance, IT, and upgrading costs, and also eliminating the need to hire IT infrastructure management skills.”
Increases Reliability with Uninterrupted Communication
Frequent data loss, including emails due to unaccounted downtimes, is now in the past. With emails synchronized with mobile devices, employees can access their mail virtually anywhere from any device. Higher mobility permits the team to connect with customers, communicate better, and stay informed even while travelling.
Speeds Decision-Making, Provides Competitive Advantage
With online meetings, video and audio conferencing, decisions are made faster and are more accurate. “Now with Lync usage we can quickly determine the status of other employees and act accordingly. By reducing the time to react to a situation and take appropriate decisions, we are seen as proactive by our customers, which is very positive for the business,” says Suchit Bachalli.
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft 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:
www.office365.com