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Beverage Firm Chooses Microsoft Cloud Solution over Google’s for Responsiveness, Reliability, Security

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As part of the Real World with Microsoft Online Services series, we spoke to Jim Hill, Director of IT at Admiral Beverage. We asked Jim about why his company chose the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite from Microsoft Online Services over Google Apps to manage the company’s messaging and collaboration environment. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Can you tell us what Admiral Beverage does? Who are your customers?
Hill: Admiral Beverage is a bottler and distributor of Pepsi soft-drink products. The company has been around for more than 60 years and we've grown to about 1,650 employees. In addition to our headquarters location in Worland, Wyoming, where the company was founded we now have sales centers throughout the western United States, stretching from South Dakota all the way up to Alaska.

Q: What were some of the challenges Admiral Beverage faced that led it to adopt an online services model for its messaging and collaboration infrastructure?
Hill: Email is mission critical for us; we can't afford to be without it for any length of time. As we expanded and added locations, it became more costly and time-intensive to maintain our on-premises infrastructure for email. And over the years, we encountered more and more issues that affected email service. Employees reported that they had trouble connecting to the email server from a remote location about 50 percent of the time. When people were connected, they often indicated that their email messages were getting stuck in their outbox folders. We knew we needed a more reliable and scalable infrastructure to support growth, so we started looking for a solution that would eliminate the need for setting up and maintaining servers, implementing failover and security solutions, and ultimately help us provide better communication and productivity tools to employees.

Q: Why did you choose Microsoft Online Services over the other solutions that you evaluated?
Hill: We gave both Google Apps and Microsoft Online Services an equal look as part of our evaluation process. After testing both solutions, it was clear to us that Microsoft offers a more reliable, secure cloud-based messaging and collaboration solution than Google. A big part of it for us was trust in the vendor relationship, too. Based on our experience, Microsoft was much more responsive in terms of providing support and technical assistance when we needed it. To feel confident in moving critical applications like email to the cloud, we needed to be comfortable with the technology provider and not just the functionality. With Google, we were largely on our own. By contrast, Microsoft has shown a commitment to fostering the long-term growth of our business.

Q: What kinds of benefits are you experiencing by using Microsoft Online Services?  
Hill: The biggest benefit we've seen so far is connectivity to email. Employees have been raving about how quickly they can connect to their email from anywhere without any problems. From an IT perspective, it makes our lives much easier, too. We are able to deliver fast, reliable email service without having to constantly upgrade and maintain infrastructure to handle redundancy, disaster recovery, and security, which saves our team about five hours a week. We achieved a one-time cost savings of U.S. $100,000 and expect to save about $12,000 a year by eliminating the need for on-premises email servers, connectivity infrastructure, and separate anti-spam and antivirus solutions.

Read the full story online. For more success stories like Jim Hill's at Admiral Beverage, read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website. What savings are coming from using Microsoft cloud services at your company?

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