Real World with Microsoft Online Services – Overland Solutions

As part of the Real World with Microsoft Online Services series, we spoke to David R. Robinson, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Overland Solutions, Inc., about why Overland Solutions chose the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite from Microsoft Online Services over Google Apps to manage its messaging and collaboration environment. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Can you tell us what Overland Solutions does? Who are your customers?
Robinson: Overland Solutions provides premium audit services, property inspections, and loss-control services for the insurance industry, government agencies, and other large organizations. We are based in Overland Park, Kansas, but Overland Solutions operates throughout the United States and parts of Canada. We also have operations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Q: What were some of the challenges Overland Solutions faced that led it to adopt an online services model for its messaging and collaboration infrastructure?
Robinson: We were interested in using cloud computing to help reduce the burden on our IT staff and to help develop a less expensive disaster-recovery strategy. But our biggest challenge is that we have a highly mobile workforce. We wanted to find a cloud-based messaging and collaboration solution that could help our employees build some community and stay coordinated.

Almost 75 percent of our employees work autonomously at customer sites, distributed all over the country and often disconnected from the company network. Plus, the field employees use applications that we’ve developed in-house. Because they don’t generate many of their own Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, we didn’t give them Microsoft Office software; they had to get by with OpenOffice. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but purchasing another 750 licenses for Office would have been a significant expense that was hard to justify for very limited use. 

Q: Why did you choose Microsoft Online Services over the other solutions that you evaluated?
Robinson: In 2010, we evaluated Google Apps. Google had an attractive offering from a pricing perspective, but we thought Google Apps had some serious limitations. For example, at that time, you could not work offline on the Google Apps spread sheets. We began working with Valorem Consulting, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network that has expertise in both on-premises and cloud-computing messaging solutions. They demonstrated how we could use the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite to deliver an entire package of collaboration solutions that matched the segmented structure of our workforce. Most importantly, they showed us how we could integrate Business Productivity Online with Office 2010 installed locally on our PCs and extend the capabilities of Office software to our entire workforce in a way that made sense economically. When we compared Google Apps to Business Productivity Online and Office 2010 installed locally, Microsoft was the obvious choice.

Q: What kinds of benefits are you experiencing by using Microsoft Online Services? 
Robinson: First, we can keep our field staff better connected. An auditor in the middle of Wyoming can use Office Communications Online to ask a reviewer a question or use Office Live Meeting to collaborate with customers, colleagues, and partners in real time. Being able to use Office 2010 is a great productivity opportunity for our field staff, and now we can provide the identical messaging and productivity environment for every employee.

We’ve also streamlined IT management and enhanced our return on investment (ROI). I no longer have to administer an on-premises instance of Exchange Server or a SharePoint environment, or install and maintain third-party instant-messaging or web-conferencing solutions. I can also maintain email connectivity for my entire enterprise even if my data center is a smoking hole in the ground. The redundancy is already provided by Microsoft, so we can avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars for something we may never need. And by deploying Business Productivity Online, we’ve expanded our collaboration infrastructure across the entire organization for within 10 percent of what it cost us before to reach less than a quarter of our workforce. We anticipate significantly improved ROI.

Read the full story online. For more success stories like David Robinson’s at Overland Solutions, Inc., read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.