Wilkin Chapman were approaching the end of their four-year IT refresh cycle and were looking for advice on the best way forward. Bechtle, as a Microsoft gold partner, highlighted the option of the Microsoft Cloud Suite and how it could work within their business. Wilkin Chapman now had two options; they could either purchase new hardware and software whilst continuing to manage and support their own on-premise email and collaboration platform, or they could move to a subscription based model utilising Office 365 that provides all the support and maintenance required.
To help with the decision, Bechtle’s pre-sales consultants discussed the strategy with the IT staff at Wilkin Chapman - including the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Bechtle’s history of providing successful on-premise and cloud based solutions enabled Wilkin Chapman to make an informed decision on the future of their IT systems and develop a sound cloud strategy. The collaborative features provided by Office 365 were analysed to ascertain the business benefit.
The result - similar services delivered via an on-premise platform could not be achieved without a huge investment in hardware, software and professional services. With this in mind, Wilkin Chapman made the informed decision to choose Office 365 for their business. It provides a cost-effective way to deliver both the same quality of service and uptime that the employees were used to, whilst also improving communication and collaboration that would ensure they had a fantastic return on investment.
At this stage, Bechtle partnered with Cloudworks, a market leader in Microsoft cloud solutions to deliver the strategy and provide architecture advice, delivery support and training for the on-premise IT team.
Through a series of discovery workshops and knowledge transfer sessions, Cloudworks developed a migration plan for Wilkin Chapmans email platform that provided a secure and stable method of delivering the new services to the entire Wilkin Chapman team.
The feedback from the workshops enabled Bechtle to provide advice on the different licence plans available in Office 365 - ensuring Wilkin Chapman selected the most cost-effective solution for delivering their desired services.
The final stage involved Cloudworks helping to deliver a pilot migration of a sample group of users from the Wilkin Chapman user base. Following analysis, Cloudworks worked with the IT team to migrate the entire user base to Exchange Online.
With the entire user estate now consuming Exchange Online, the ‘land and expand’ approach enabled the IT team at Wilkin Chapman to further investigate and deliver other services that are also included in Office 365 - meaning they are no longer spending their time managing on-premise servers.
Through continued mentoring from Bechtle and Cloudworks, Wilkin Chapman are now working on improving their business processes by expanding into the full suite of Microsoft Cloud services. This includes delivering process improvements and automation using SharePoint and improving communications throughout the geographically diverse user estate with Skype for business.