UK sportswear retailer reduces IT spending by 50% with Office 365 from Vodafone UK

This week on the blog, we will continue to highlight success stories that came out of Microsoft’s second annual Sales and Marketing syndication summit held last month in Madrid, Spain. Telecom service provider Vodafone UK is reducing its customer’s business risk and streamlining their IT infrastructure by providing Office 365 and other Windows products. Vodafone UK is able to provide these solutions all while drastically reducing IT spending for customers.

UK-based sportswear retailer Musto Limited was looking to capitalize on a market that was finally crawling out recession, but its communication efforts were continuously undermined by an inefficient email system and spotty mobile collaboration between its 250 employees. All of Musto’s customer orders, invoices and credits, and collaboration with a global network of partners take place via email, and Mustro works with manufacturers all around the world sending large files and drawings back and forth between factories and designers.

Musto was using a diverse IT infrastructure including Exchange Server 2003, Apple with Entourage, and Blackberry suite of phone services and handsets backed by a BlackBerry Server. The biggest problems were happing with its Email server, which was unstable and had limited storage capacity - the occasional deletion meant resynchronizing heavily used mailboxes and dropping time on the sales clock. In addition, in order to offer secure data access for their large mobile workforce, Musto resorted to providing employees with USB flash drives in order to cover for email outages and remote access issues.

Musto contacted its telecommunications provider, Vodafone UK, and were surprised to learn that Vodafone and its partner D R Communications LTD offered an ideal business solution to their email and collaboration problems: Office 365 and Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 smartphones running on the Vodafone Network.

After a smooth implementation of Office 365, Musto had a reliable, user friendly webmail system and the 25 GB storage capacity for each email account gave employees the flexibility needed to send, receive, and manage larger files without problems. Without the need for a virtual private network to access email, Musto’s global workforce became more stable and quickened its response times.

This process also simplified and reduced Musto’s costs; it only pays one monthly fee for both telecommunications and Office 365 services, reducing their IT spending by 50 percent.

The change has been so beneficial that Musto is looking to amplify its new infrastructure by implementing other Office 365 collaboration tools like Lync Online, SkyDrive Pro, and SharePoint Online.

For more information check out the case study, and look for more Office 365 syndication success stories in the coming weeks on Telco Insights.