Increased Productivity Thanks to Flexible Use of Resources with Office 365

Customer: NOVUS

Industry: Retail and Customer Goods

Solution: Migration to Office 365 including Exchange Online, Skype for Business Online

NOVUS was due to renew its EA licenses for its on-premises infrastructure. The company thereby had to make an important decision: Should it continue as usual for another three years or launch its digital transformation? Given the highly competitive market, NOVUS knew that working with the cloud represented the only option for the company to continue being successful and innovative. Specifically, NOVUS hoped to minimize the expenses incurred by managing its IT infrastructure, creating more space to focus on its retail business objectives. The company’s goal was to start by equipping its headquarters with a new collaboration platform, then roll this out to its shops and supermarkets. “In order to work together even more productively and flexibly, we had to be able to network with each other from anywhere and exchange information at any time“, said Aleksey Vdovichenko, Head of IT at NOVUS.

In the past, SoftwareONE had supplied NOVUS with EA licenses. When the time came to renew the licenses, SoftwareONE offered two solution scenarios: Licensing that would still be based on a complete on-premises infrastructure, or a flexible cloud strategy including the introduction of Office 365, which would enable step-by-step migration and make good use of the license investments that had already been made within the scope of the previous EA contract. NOVUS opted for the cloud solution. SoftwareONE took over the planning and implementation of Office 365 as well as basic training of the IT staff. Initially, the productivity-boosting services Microsoft Exchange and Skype for Business were migrated to Office 365. For the IT team, this meant a more flexible and stable IT infrastructure that requires less administrative effort. A hybrid solution was implemented with ADFS for user access. Although there are currently 750+ users at the company who use Office 365 for their e-mails and Skype for Business for their communication, NOVUS is now considering introducing Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

• Using Office 365 provides NOVUS with the productivity and innovation it needs to continue operating successfully in the retail sector
• Migrating productivity-boosting services to cloud-based services has provided a more stable and flexible solution that does not require support at the basic infrastructure level and which has minimized maintenance costs
• Previously tied-up resources have been freed up, allowing the company to focus on core business and new projects in the IT department.