Real World with Microsoft Online Services – Rexel

As part of the Real World Microsoft Online Services series, we spoke to Olivier Baldassari, Chief Information Officer at Rexel, and Thomas Huber, Global IT Collaboration Manager at Rexel, about why Rexel chose Microsoft Online Services over Gmail from Google Apps to manage its messaging and collaboration environment. Here’s what they had to say:

Q: Can you give us a quick summary of what Rexel does and who you serve?
Baldassari: Rexel delivers low-voltage electrical components used by hardware manufacturers, industrial users, and electrical contractors in residential, commercial, and industrial markets throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. With 28,000 employees, Rexel is a major international player that provides innovative electrical solutions and services to improve comfort, performance, and energy efficiency.

Q: What were some of the challenges Rexel faced that led it to adopt an online services model for its messaging and collaboration infrastructure?
Huber: Because the company’s grown by acquisition, there are 42 different messaging platforms that exist right now. Each of those individual platforms are different, so they can’t communicate with each other—they are like silos. Conducting business and having an unreliable system is extremely painful. A lot of our business runs on email, so we need a best-in-class messaging system.

Baldassari: When we started to look at consolidating our infrastructure, it was primarily a cost-cutting exercise. So, we looked at a number of areas where we thought we could reduce costs, and messaging was one of them. What started as a cost-cutting exercise became actually more an opportunity to support business change.

Q: Why did you choose Microsoft Online Services over other solutions that you evaluated?
Baldassari: When we started to look at messaging, we had little experience in cloud solutions, and we went for an in-depth comparison. Eventually, we came to a short list with on one hand Microsoft Online Services and on the other hand Gmail from Google. The first question was: what about integration issues? Because you are mixing, on one hand, a Microsoft Outlook client, with a backend that would have been Gmail.

Google has some experience in the enterprise world with its search capabilities, but working with a large population of users with a tool like messaging, which is a business-critical tool, is a different beast. We didn’t feel at that time that Google had the breadth of experience required to support us on a global scale.

Huber: One of the big criteria for going with Microsoft Online Services was the enterprise experience and support that Microsoft had. I witness that support every day and it’s top notch. When I make a call, I get an answer, and if it needs to be escalated, it happens, and I get results. I can’t imagine that anybody could match that right now in this space.

Q: How are you using Microsoft Online Services and what kinds of benefits are you experiencing? 
Huber: Everybody sees the value in the collaboration portion of it. By moving to Microsoft Online Services, I now see—for those countries that are there—contact information, phone numbers, addresses, everything else, even calendar information that we didn’t have visibility into before, which is instant productivity.

Baldassari: From my perspective, going to the cloud is a case of survival. That’s where IT is going. So, standardization in a company like Rexel brings productivity. I think the experience we had with Microsoft Online Services was great. We took the right level of risk and I think the outcome is great.

View the video case study and read the full story. For more success stories like Rexel’s, read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.
 

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