Retailer Reduces Hardware, Licensing, and IT Costs with Cloud Solution

Free Record Shop tells us why Microsoft was the best decision to accelerate their use of the cloud!

“Office 365 not only helps us work more efficiently and effectively together, the savings are also phenomenal. Bottom line, this solution is increasing our competitiveness.” -- Denys Purwin, Chief Technology Officer of Free Record Shop

Free Record Shop
Free Record Shop Holding is a privately owned, 1,800-person, entertainment retailer with brands in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. It offers gifts and entertainment items (such as records, movies, games etc.), as well as a number of web properties.

IT Challenges
Entertainment retail is a fast-moving market in which quick, comprehensive communication between departments, such as marketing and sales, is critical to business success. Free Record Shop's stores need to be continually updated on which titles are the top sellers and which are not as popular. The company strives for the most efficient way to do business, looking for synergies between different departments, and in times when teams from different properties work together on a project.

The company's regional managers, each of whom is responsible for many shops, were not able to access important documents while traveling. This impeded responsiveness and collaboration. Another challenge was the “bricks and clicks” connection. ?Free Record Shop wanted to facilitate the ability of physical stores to connect to real-time, online store inventory and obtain titles that a customer is requesting, while keeping costs low. Keeping costs flexible was even more important; the company needs the flexibility to quickly close stores in a brand that isn't performing and rebuild them under another brand, a difficult task for its IT department to support. The company needed a flexible solution that would enable file sharing and easy file access anytime, anywhere, while minimizing work for IT staff.

IT Solution and Benefits
The company had begun moving to a more cloud-based environment two years ago by switching to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a set of messaging and collaboration tools delivered in the cloud. Having hosted solutions minimized the initial investment required, and helped the company keep skilled people on its IT staff.

Looking to take additional steps in cloud-based computing to further facilitate collaboration and reduce the impact on IT staff, the company evaluated several solutions, including OpenOffice and Google Apps, before deciding on Microsoft Office 365. Its IT solutions provider, Wortell, had already supported Free Record Shop with Microsoft BPOS so Office 365 seemed the next logical step as it includes even more capabilities. It was the natural upgrade with the latest Microsoft technologies. “From a user's perspective, the look, feel, and functionality of Office 365 are in a whole different league?plus, employees don't have to spend a lot of time adapting to the new solution,” comments Denys Purwin, Chief Technology Officer of Free Record Shop.

The company is currently using Microsoft SharePoint Online for senior management, giving them a fast and easy way to share files while traveling and to access store inventory. Free Record Shop sees the potential to extend the solution more deeply throughout its brands, enabling employees to work together on projects across brands?a process that has historically been very difficult.

The company also appreciated the impact afforded by the Office 365 pricing model. “The pay-as-you-go pricing with Office 365 gives us the flexibility we need in a constantly changing environment, with employees and stores moving from one company or brand to another within the company. With Office 365 we also do not need to invest a lot of money in replacing current end-of-life hardware,” says Purwin.  Purwin estimates that the company has saved €150,000 on hardware and user CALs, plus an additional reduction in running costs of €50,000 per year.

“Office 365 not only helps us work more efficiently and effectively together,” says Purwin. “But the savings are also phenomenal. Bottom line, this solution is increasing our competitiveness.”

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