Telecom reaches for the Cloud

Telecom New Zealand has decided to move to the cloud with the Microsoft Office 365 productivity platform, leveraging the new managed service platform recently announced by Infosys, Microsoft and Gen-i, Telecom’s ICT services division.

The deal represents the largest commitment to a public cloud solution from any organisation in New Zealand, with the Office 365 solution helping Telecom gain efficiencies and cost savings through a unified platform for communication and collaboration.

“Central to Telecom’s growth strategy is a focus on creating greater efficiency and simplifying the way we operate and serve our customers,” says David Havercroft, CTO Telecom New Zealand.

“Office 365 will support these goals by providing our staff the latest enterprise-ready software, enabling better communication and collaboration through a set of familiar and integrated productivity services.“

Once deployed, Telecom staff will have access to the full range of Office products including Exchange for email, Lync for video conferencing, applications such as Word and Excel for document creation, and SharePoint for collaboration and document sharing.

“We are excited to be working with Telecom to deliver the biggest deployment of Office 365 in New Zealand to date," says Jordy Almgren, Enterprise Group Managing Director at Microsoft.

"Telecom’s decision to move onto an Office 365 solution highlights their commitment to utilising the latest, best-in-class cloud productivity solutions available, and we expect many other large companies will look to make a similar shift towards managed, cloud-based solutions as organisations like Telecom begin to realise the benefits."

Telecom reviewed its applications and considered a range of cloud-based productivity solutions over a period of eight months before committing to the Microsoft solution.
“We took a very measured approach to ensure we went with a solution that would deliver the most benefit, and ultimately selected Office 365 as the best option for our organisation,” says Havercroft.

“The same products can be offered to all staff and managed in the cloud, eliminating the need for patching, server upgrades and basic administration tasks for email, freeing up IT resources to work on value add projects, which can only mean better outcomes for our customers.”

“Telecom will benefit from Microsoft’s 20 plus years of experience in productivity capability, allowing them to better serve their customers, and operate a truly modern workspace by being able to access email and information from virtually any smart phone, remote PC or other mobile device,” comments Almgren.

For more information on Microsoft Office 365, please visit www.microsoft.co.nz or contact your technology partner.