When Strategy Meets Execution

Imagine that you are CIO of an Asia-based firm with 7000 employees around the globe, operating eight business units across a range of industries. Not only do you recognize the importance of representing your businesses though a unified, global brand, you have existing IT investments and need to work with a service provider which can help you be cost-effective in addressing your short and long-term communications in a regulated marketplace. Enter Gary Choi, Group Chief Information Officer, Emperor Group.

While there is more to learn about Emperor Group’s choice and implementation of Office 365 over Google Apps, the basic reasons for their move were the choice of implementation options, and the flexibility in supporting a global brand that Microsoft Office 365 provided.  

Emperor Group spent a month evaluating both Google Apps and Office 365, testing across geographies for connectivity, speed and functionality. Since doing business in certain locales presents unique considerations, Emperor Group had been using multiple domains in the region, including country-specific ones. From the tests they learned that Office 365 excelled in terms of meeting the company’s IT needs, and the service could work seamlessly across geographic boundaries, supporting multiple domains.

This would allow them to merge domains, establishing a unified, global, online brand identity. Office 365 is flexible, supporting a single, global brand by working seamlessly across geographic boundaries.

There is a lot of buzz about a variety of hybrid deployments, which artfully blend on-premise and cloud services  in various industries in many ways. Only Office 365 provides a hybrid deployment choice for productivity services, which helps organizations to capitalize on existing resources, stage their cloud transitions for various reasons, or keep certain functions on premises.

With Emperor Group, both type of service delivery and the actual deployment became simple things. “Office 365’s support for multiple domains and hybrid mode makes migration much easier”, says Choi. He continues, “Office 365 is easy to deploy, with minimum training required, and it takes only one third of the normal implementation time. With its faster deployment and management tools it is estimated to save our IT resources half a man-year that can now be spent on other, critical business priorities.” 

Gary Choi sums it up. “Emperor Group runs a wide range of businesses and we realize the increasing importance of building a global brand, and a unified presence with a common, IT platform and a single, domain name for these businesses. The deployment of Office 365 could not have come at better time as we were seeking a compelling cloud solution that could integrate well with our existing IT infrastructure, and so we could migrate to cloud on our own terms.”