Microsoft Online ServicesCustomer Solution Case Study

Agency Gains Reliability with Cloud Email, Saves 94 Percent over Cost of Self-Hosting

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Public sector—State and local

Customer ProfileThe Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, located in the Bronx borough of New York City, is the economic development consultant for the Office of the Bronx Borough President.

Business SituationFast, effective communications were crucial to the agency, but its email system was prone to crashes, slow when it was running, and didn’t provide efficient connections to mobile devices.

SolutionThe agency replaced its self-hosted email system with Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite from Microsoft Online Services.

Benefits Supports 40 percent increase in loan

processing Provides “green” email support for

mobile devices Delivers collaboration tools Reduces costs by 94 percent compared

to self-hosting

“Given what we are getting with Business Productivity Online, and what we are paying for it, there was no way we couldn’t choose this solution.”

Marlene Cintron, President, Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation

How do you hand out millions of dollars in grants and loans each year when you quite literally can’t get the word out? The Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation faced a difficult situation: its email system crashed regularly and was slow when it did work. To counter this, the agency adopted the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, a cloud-based solution. The system was deployed seamlessly in two days. Now, crashes are a thing of the past. Email flows quickly and reliably, supporting a 40 percent increase in loan processing. Also, the agency now has a “green” alternative for extending email to mobile devices, and is in the process of adopting new services—from instant messaging to web conferencing. As a bonus, the Microsoft solution costs 94 percent less than it would have cost to expand the previous self-hosted environment to achieve similar benefits.

SituationNo borough of New York City was hit harder during the recession than the Bronx. Now, no borough is roaring back faster. The Bronx has seen more than U.S.$1 billion in housing construction, a 32 percent decrease in crime, and the entry of some of the nation’s largest retailers into the Bronx market.

The Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation (BOEDC) has played, and continues to play, an important role in supporting this growth. The agency manages $28 million in federal grants and $90 million in bond funds to assist local businesses. Its 25 employees work throughout the borough, meeting with borrowers, grant recipients, major retailers, and others. Each month they might send more than 20 loan packages, each three to four inches thick, to borrowers.

Reliable email is essential to the agency’s operations. “We are handling extremely time-sensitive material—every day,” says Marlene Cintron, President of the BOEDC. “Papers need to be signed or filed by deadline or major sums of money can be at stake. Email is the way to do this. I get about 300 email messages a day. I’d say that at least 75 percent of all our communications are handled via email.”

But email wasn’t performing for the BOEDC the way that an essential service should. On the day that Cintron arrived at the agency nine months ago, the email system went down—and stayed down for three days. That rude welcome was not actually an isolated incident. Typically the system crashed three to four times per month.

Every time it did, the agency’s operations came to a virtual standstill.

“Email would go down and we’d be reduced to faxing or express-mailing documents,” says Madeline V. Marquez, Executive Director of the Business Initiative Corporation of New York, part of the BOEDC. “The first was inefficient, the second was slow and expensive.”

Not only did the transmittal of loan packages and other documents come to a halt, but so did a vital communications link between BOEDC representatives in the field and their colleagues back at the office. The crashes, the BOEDC came to realize, were the result of limits to bandwidth and storage capacity, as well as flaws in the hardware that ran the agency’s self-hosted system.

Even when the email system did not crash, it did not operate very well. Email messages were sometimes slow to follow traveling executives. Because of the various limitations to the system, large attachments or sets of attachments often had to be broken up and sent in several pieces. To send or receive email using their Blackberry mobile phones, BOEDC representatives had to keep their desktop PCs operating all day, every day. If the desktop PC was turned off, employees couldn’t synchronize a calendar or receive any auto-updated information. The problem was a consequence of using Blackberry desktop software to route information to and from the phone. This situation put the BOEDC in a very difficult position given its policy of requiring borrowers and grantees to reduce their carbon footprints, that is, to be “green.”

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“Email would go down and we’d be reduced to faxing or express-mailing documents. The first was inefficient, the second was slow and expensive.”Madeline V. Marquez, Executive Director,

Business Initiative Corporation of New York

“We have a major focus on promoting green technology; all of the projects we finance must be certified as being green,” says Cintron. “We had to find a way to use our phones for email that didn’t require such a waste of energy.”

SolutionThe agency considered expanding its infrastructure to relieve the problems caused by limited computing resources. But adding hardware, software, and maintenance would come to about $65,000 a year—funds that the BOEDC, funneling all available dollars to its clients, didn’t have allocated in its budget. Even if it had, merely adding to the existing infrastructure would do nothing to address many of the problems that the agency experienced.

Cloud services, in which services and IT solutions and applications at remote data centers are delivered and consumed in real time over the Internet, looked more promising. Bandwidth, storage, and computing limitations would immediately disappear; the agency could scale up whenever it needed to do so, paying only for the resources it used, when it used them. The cloud computing service would be responsible to meet agreed-upon service-level agreements, which would give the BOEDC the amount of availability for which it was willing to pay.

Cintron and her colleagues considered the adoption of Google Apps. They decided against it. “We aren’t into experimenting,” says Cintron. “Google was offering a relatively untried service. Would it have the reliability we needed? Would it have the people to back it up? We didn’t want to find out.”

The agency’s search for a new email solution was part of its larger search for a new IT outsource provider. When Cintron met Aric K. Perminter, Chief Executive Officer, and David Elcock, Chief Operating Officer, of Lynx Technologies Partners, she knew she’d completed that larger search. “Aric and David not only knew technology, but they knew our business, our issues—and how to apply technology to them. I knew they were the ones for us.”

Perminter introduced Cintron to another cloud services choice: Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services. It provides mobile and desktop e-mail, calendaring and contacts, presence and instant messaging (IM), audio/video conferencing, shared workspaces, and web-conferencing applications. The solution includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online. These enterprise communication and collaboration applications are hosted by Microsoft at its data centers and can be licensed with assistance from partners like Lynx Technologies Partners, which can help with configuration.

“Going with Business Productivity Online was a no-brainer for us,” says Cintron. “Microsoft has served us well for a long time. It has the resources to back up what it’s offering, and it always delivers. Microsoft and the BOEDC have been a good marriage. Adopting the Microsoft solution made great sense.”

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“Going with Business Productivity Online was a no-brainer for us. Microsoft has served us well for a long time. It has the resources to back up what it’s offering, and it always delivers.”Marlene Cintron, President, Bronx Overall

Economic Development Corporation

To address the concerns about email mobility, Lynx Technologies Partners joined the Blackberry devices to Business Productivity Online by providing Microsoft Online Services with a list of the devices to be added to the agency’s email system. The devices were then registered with a Blackberry Enterprise Server hosted in the cloud and users were given passwords to activate their new accounts. Lynx Technologies can implement changes to the roster of mobile device users through the Administrative Center web screen for Business Productivity Online.

Lynx Technologies Partners and the BOEDC accomplished the move to Business Productivity Online over two days to about 25 computers, with just one technician, in March 2010. Much of that time was spent updating unevenly maintained PCs. Then, accounts in the new system were created for BOEDC employees, in a highly automated process, using existing profiles in Active Directory Domain Services. Providing employees with access to Business Productivity Online was a 15-minute process. Once that process was complete, Lynx Technologies Partners implemented a complete changeover from the self-hosted system to Business Productivity Online.

“That Lynx could get us onto Business Productivity Online in just two days, using one person for the work, was amazing,” says Cintron. “And the move was completely seamless to our people. One night we were on the old system, the next morning we were on the new system. No one’s work was disrupted.”

BenefitsThe Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation is experiencing many benefits from its move to Business Productivity Online Standard Suite—fast and reliable email, “greener” support for mobile devices, a host of new communication and collaboration tools, and a 94 percent reduction over the cost of expanding its previous environment to accomplish similar goals.

Supports 40 Percent Increase in Loan ProcessingThe BOEDC now has the reliable email system it wanted—a system on which it can depend more readily, and work more productively.

“Now, we have zero issues with reliability,” says Cintron. “Business Productivity Online just works. It handles large attachments without a problem, so we don’t have to send documents out over several emails. We don’t have to do as much follow-up to see if our emails were received, because we know that what we send goes where it’s supposed to go.”

For the BOEDC, this isn’t just a convenience; it’s a real productivity booster. “Because we have this more reliable, more efficient email system, we actually process loans faster—about 40 percent faster,” says Cintron. “That means we do a better job for the people that we’re here to serve.”

Cintron also sees that Business Productivity Online is contributing to the BOEDC’s ability to increase its support for Bronx businesses, without also increasing staff. “Because we’re more efficient and more productive, we can handle increases in loan

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“Business Productivity Online just works. It handles large attachments without a problem, so we don’t have to send documents out over several emails.”Marlene Cintron, President, Bronx Overall

Economic Development Corporation

volume with the staff we have,” she says. “And when we want to increase staff, we know that our technology won’t be a limitation—we can scale up on Business Productivity Online as much as we want.”

Provides “Green” Email Support for Mobile DevicesThe BOEDC has also met its goal of improving email messaging to and from staff in the field.

Cintron and her colleagues say that such email now operates quickly and reliably. “I often need to exchange information with people in the field, and do so right away,” says Cintron. “That happens more effectively now that we’re on Business Productivity Online. I can’t calculate the value of that.”

The agency has also met its goal of “going green” by eliminating the need to keep unused PCs running throughout the day and night. Because email to and from the mobile devices is channeled through Business Productivity Online, rather than through desktop PCs, those PCs can be powered down when not in use. “We feel very good about that,” says Cintron.

Delivers Collaboration ToolsReliable email isn’t the only capability that the BOEDC gains with the move to Business Productivity Online. The agency now also takes advantage of presence and instant messaging. The technology is useful both for communicating with colleagues within the agency’s facility, and for communicating between the agency’s headquarters and the field.

“IM is a great alternative to sending an email when I want to contact someone immediately,” says Marquez. “I get a quicker response. I can see who’s active, who’s offline. It saves me from sending an email or waiting for a response when the person I’m trying to reach isn’t there. And IM is easier to respond to—it’s more like talking than writing a memo.”

As a subscriber to Business Productivity Online, the BOEDC now also has access to web conferencing, collaboration, and document management capabilities. “We’re taking our adoption of cloud computing one step at a time,” says Cintron. “But it’s easy to envision expanding our use to host meetings without the need for travel, and to collaborate with borrowers and others outside the agency as though they were down the hall. Business Productivity Online gives us room to grow, and we intend to take advantage of it.”

Reduces Costs by 94 PercentThe agency’s challenge was to resolve its email situation without incurring additional expense. It’s accomplished that—and far more. Expanding the original infrastructure to scale out sufficiently would have incurred first-year costs of $65,000, including continuing maintenance costs of $50,000 per year.

In contrast, the BOEDC pays only $250 per month—$3,000 per year—for Business Productivity Online, based on factors including the number of seats it licenses and the service-level agreements it has with Microsoft. That’s a reduction of at least 94 percent over the costs of building out a self-hosted environment.

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“I don’t just praise Business Productivity Online to the rafters. I praise it to the clouds.”Marlene Cintron, President, Bronx Overall

Economic Development Corporation

“Given what we are getting with Business Productivity Online, and what we are paying for it, there was no way we couldn’t choose this solution,” says Cintron. “It’s made a big difference in the way we do business, and it’s certainly made me look better. We’re about business, we have to operate efficiently, and this helps us to do that.

“I don’t just praise Business Productivity Online to the rafters,” adds Cintron, with a smile. “I praise it to the clouds.”Microsoft Online ServicesMicrosoft Online Services are business-class communication and collaboration solutions delivered as a subscription service and hosted by Microsoft. With these offerings, customers can cost-effectively access the most up-to-date technologies and immediately benefit from streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security features. For IT staffers, Microsoft Online Services are backed by strong service level agreements and help reduce the burden of performing routine IT management, freeing up time to focus on core business initiatives.

For more information, visit: www.microsoft.com/online

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Lynx Technologies Partners, call (800) 314-0455 or visit the website at: www.lynxtp.com

For more information about Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, call (718) 590-6265 or visit the website at:www.boedc.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published December 2010

Software and Services Microsoft Online Services− Microsoft Business Productivity

Online Standard Suite

Partners Lynx Technologies Partners