Share via

Startup Bets on Online Services to Reduce Costs and Grow

  • Article

Today we hear from EurosporBET on why Microsoft was the best decision in their move to expand their business and embrace cloud computing!

“Microsoft Online Services appealed to us more than Google Apps because the Online Services interoperate with Microsoft Office, which improves usability for quick time-to-benefit.”                     -- Pierre Puchois, Director of IT Production

EurosportBET
EurosportBET, the commercial brand of SBS Betting, couples a passion for sport with the Internet’s potential in reaching a large audience. With an emphasis on live events, EurosportBET offers betting on poker, horse racing, and a variety of sports including football and tennis. It holds two remote gambling licenses issued to SPS Betting by regulators in France and in the United Kingdom. EurosportBET maintains IT infrastructures in Paris and Guernsey to support its websites as well as its own infrastructure for 75 Paris-based employees.

IT Challenges
“Our adventure began in Paris in 2008 with 10 employees and the expectations of rapid growth,” says Pierre Puchois, Director of IT Production at EurosportBET. “As a startup, our priority was to quickly build a cost-effective IT infrastructure so we could focus on our main objective: build a website that would offer an entertaining, secure online gaming experience for our customers.”
EurosportBET IT staff did not want to devote time and resources to everyday IT services, such as messaging and collaboration technologies that today’s computer-savvy employees expect to have. “Companies need to focus on their essential objectives and keep their costs down,” says Puchois. “We have strong IT competencies; however, we prefer to dedicate them to building our website for online gambling. We didn’t want to use these resources to maintain our everyday productivity tools. That’s something we preferred to delegate.”

IT Solution and Benefits
EurosportBET evaluated the Google Apps hosted email offering. A Microsoft Certified Partner, Proxitec, then introduced the company to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. Microsoft Online Services appealed to us more than Google Apps because the Online Services interoperate with Microsoft Office, which improves usability for quick time-to-benefit,” says Puchois. “And because we get up-to-date technologies backed by a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee from Microsoft, we have confidence that business email and collaboration services would always be available. With a hosted solution, we benefit from a highly secure and available infrastructure without having to maintain it ourselves.”

In March 2009, EurosportBET subscribed to 80 seats of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online. The company worked with Proxitec to enable access to Exchange Online for all employees. Then in June 2009, Proxitec designed an intranet based on SharePoint Online. Using the intranet, employees can build their own workspaces, share documents, and collaborate on marketing and customer support activities.

EurosportBET needed to focus on building and launching its sports gambling website, and the company used Microsoft Online Services to achieve that goal. “As a startup company, we wanted to get up and running as quickly as possible without wasting money,” says Puchois. “Microsoft Online Services were the perfect answer. With virtually no up-front costs, we could allocate more resources to building our website, significantly reducing the time that it took to start realizing revenue—a key benefit for any new company.”

Today, EurosportBET employees are enjoying a high level of productivity at low cost. Employees are using desktop and mobile email, shared calendars and contacts, instant messaging, shared online workspaces, and online video conferencing to keep the business running no matter where they are working!

Read the full case study and please fill us in on how you are using Microsoft online services such as Office 365 in your business.

Comments