Partner Solution Case Study
/ Telco Meets Customer Demand with Managed Communications and Collaboration Solutions
Overview
Country or Region: Switzerland
Industry: Telecommunications
Partner Profile
With 5.8 million mobile customers and 1.6 million broadband connections, Swisscom is the major telecommunications provider in Switzerland.
Business Situation
Swisscom wanted to diversify its offerings by launching a managed communications and collaboration service for its large business customers.
Solution
Swisscom implemented a managed communications and collaboration service based on Microsoft Lync Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and Exchange Server 2010.
Benefits
· Meets customer needs
· Provides a fast payback
· Helps maintain leadership
through diversification
· Opens the door to international opportunities
· Provides confidence with
internal deployment / “The telecom world is changing. People want more than voice: they want their voice solutions integrated with their business processes.”
Michael Kerle, Sr. Director Product Strategy Corporate Business, Swisscom
As the leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland, Swisscom spent a lot of effort understanding its customers’ needs for communications. It noticed a growing trend of customers who want to integrate voice communications with other business processes to improve collaboration and business agility. Swisscom decided to support this customer demand by offering bundled voice and data services, either on-premises or in the cloud. Swisscom turned to Microsoft for a unified communications and collaboration solution using Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Swisscom has successfully rolled out the service in Switzerland and is on track to meet its planned payback period of 18 months.
Situation
Swisscom is the leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland, with around 5.9 million mobile customers and 1.6 million broadband connections. It offers a full range of products and services for mobile, fixed-line, and IP-based voice and data communications. It also provides IT outsourcing services for business customers. In 2010, the company generated revenue of approximately CHF12 billion (U.S.$14 billion).
Swisscom sees the telecommunications business changing quickly and wants to be an innovator in the business to help retain its customer base. To do this, it is investing heavily in voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services—and not just VoIP on top of private-branch exchange (PBX) systems. Swisscom sees the advantage of software-powered VoIP that can be integrated with business applications. “The telecom world is changing. People want more than voice: they want their voice solutions integrated with their business processes,” explains Michael Kerle, Sr. Director Product Strategy Corporate Business at Swisscom. “The better customers can integrate voice services with existing business processes, the more money they save and the more agile their businesses can be.”
Swisscom did extensive market research to understand its customers’ needs prior to designing its solution. “We initiated a special project called ‘Dialog Zukunft’ [‘talking about the future’]. We contacted our entire customer base and asked them where they want to go with their communications in the future,” explains Kerle. “We learned that about a third of our customers want to deploy a full unified communications and collaboration solution.”
The company also learned that although its customers see the value in integrated voice solutions, they found the task of implementing and managing those solutions to be challenging. Kerle says, “Integrated communications solutions are becoming increasingly complex for companies to operate—plus, they use up significant capital and IT expertise. The growing need for companies to focus on core business is accelerating the trend toward outsourcing infrastructure solutions.” To meet its customers’ needs, Swisscom wanted to provide a solution that combined voice, and communication and collaboration applications, with its network and experience in consulting, planning, and operations.
The telecommunications provider also wanted to offer corporate customers a choice, with either on-premises solutions in their own data centers, or cloud-based services from the Swisscom data center. Kerle explains, “Our aim is to bolster the Swisscom brand by offering maximum flexibility and scalability to accommodate individual customer needs.” Swisscom estimated that between 40 and 60 percent of its customers would not want to put their core infrastructure in the cloud at this time, so including an on-premises option was critical to the solution’s success.
Solution
After Swisscom investigated solutions from the primary unified communications solution vendors, it quickly decided that Microsoft was the best choice because the Microsoft solution interoperates best with desktop applications and is the easiest to manage. Swisscom also had extensive experience with the Microsoft solutions: it had selected Microsoft to provide unified communications capabilities for its own workforce. “We have 15,000 employees who use our Microsoft solution, so that gives us the confidence to offer it to our own customers,” says Kerle.
Swisscom Managed Services was launched in February of 2011. It provides voice, video, instant messaging, presence, and conferencing for its customers through Microsoft Lync Server 2010, which it bundles with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for email and voicemail and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for collaboration. “For the public launch, we had five pilot customers on stage who could talk about their very positive experiences with the solution,” explains Kerle. “We held an internal launch as well, with a one-day sales training for the entire sales force. We wanted to ensure everyone had been trained on the solution ahead of time, because selling a managed service is completely different from what they were used to selling.”
The company is bundling its managed services solution with security and connectivity services, which can include traditional telephony gateways or the company’s Microsoft-certified SIP trunking services. In addition, Swisscom provides networking services and integration with its mobile device services. With other hosted solutions, customers may have to rely on multiple vendors, which also means having multiple service-level agreements (SLAs). Swisscom has full control over the customer experience. “We have end-to-end responsibility for the solution, starting with the SIP trunk and including the phone service, the LAN, and the WAN if they have different locations,” says Kerle. “By managing the full solution, we can guarantee service levels for our customers for the full solution—not just for the software or for the network alone.”
The company operates its managed services from its own data center, and offers solutions both for customers who want a hosted environment and for customers who want their solutions deployed on-premises. “We have a dedicated virtual infrastructure at our own data center for each of our customers, which gives us the freedom to deploy whatever customers need in their environment,” explains Kerle. The solutions are deployed using HP hardware and the HP CloudSystem to achieve a low-cost, flexible hosting solution. To monitor both its hosted services and its on-premises deployments, Swisscom uses a multitenant system provided by WinWorkers, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network with Gold competencies. The system, which includes Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, automates much of the operations and billing for the solution, which helps keep operations costs down.
Swisscom offers customers three network service models: no downtime, limited downtime, and no SLA. “So far, the most popular is the model with no downtime,” says Kerle. “Lync is a part of the telephony service for our solution, and with telephony people are used to no downtime.” The company also made a large investment in a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week operations center where it offers customer support in four languages.
While it manages all servers at its data center in Switzerland, the company has partnered with Verizon and NTT Communications to provide connectivity and with Dimension Data for systems integration in other countries. For companies with multiple branch offices, it also offers survivable branch appliances (SBAs), which are based on cost-effective media gateways integrated with Lync Server software. SBAs provide a communication and phone services to end users at the branch office in the event of a wide area network failure. “With this technology and these partners, we can cover the world, but all of our data and operations remain in Switzerland,” says Kerle.
Currently Swisscom is marketing the service to companies headquartered in Switzerland. “We are the company of trust in this country,” says Kerle. “We sell our ‘Swissness.’ We can promise our customers that their data and operations will remain in Switzerland. We offer them local support in four languages, local data centers, and full integration with our networking and mobile services, and we can bundle it into one offering. That’s what makes us unique.” Swisscom has found that the customer base for the service is independent of size and industry; rather, it is driven by companies that have a mobile workforce or that have many offices, whether within Switzerland or internationally.
Benefits
By bundling Microsoft communications and collaboration technologies with its network, SIP trunking, and mobile integration services, Swisscom found a way to expand its business model to stay in tune with the demands of its forward-thinking customers, and it can base its business on more than just low-margin systems integration work. “Lync allows us to grow our business in two ways,” says Kerle. “One is that we can actually almost double our end user base by going international. The second is that we can support them better in their daily business and not just deliver telecommunications technology.”
Meets Customer Needs
Customers pay a fixed price per–user, per-month for managed services based around Microsoft technologies. When Swisscom upgraded from Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to Lync Server 2010, it deployed the new solution in four weeks. Swisscom uses the best practices it learned from its own deployment to help customers avoid a high up-front investment and a 6-to-12 month installation time for these services. Because Swisscom provides an end-to-end solution, customers do not have to worry about administration and have peace of mind that it will be reliable.
“Swisscom can support us on a global basis,” explains Bojan Jancar, Chief Information Officer at SoftwareONE, a Swisscom customer. “In the past we had to deal with different PBXs in different regions and different contractors and providers. Swisscom can support us with the Lync Server infrastructure so that we can focus on the topics that we have to deal with on a daily basis.”
Provides a Fast Payback
By offering a reasonable pricing model and quick provisioning, Swisscom expects customers to adopt its unified communications services steadily over the next five years, which means it will see a fast return on its own investment. The company’s primary investments were for the data center to host the service, the operations center to manage it, and the training for its sales force to sell it. “From a business plan point of view, we are on schedule,” says Kerle. “We see a payback on our investment in this services offering in 18 to 36 months.”
Helps Maintain Leadership Through Diversification
Swisscom has long been the market leader in Switzerland for telephony services, and it believes it can be a market leader in managed services as well. Kerle explains, “We are the market leader in Switzerland, and by providing these services bundled with Microsoft technologies, we can maintain leadership and keep our customers satisfied.”
By moving away from traditional telecom services, Swisscom can offer more diversified services to help its business thrive. “We are definitely on the right track,” says Kerle. “We bought some IT shops to help add to our IT capabilities. We just need to change our customers’ perception about what we can offer.”
Going forward, Swisscom sees even more opportunities to offer services. “We could add desktop or Active Directory management, or we could expand what our customers can do with their SharePoint Server deployments,” says Kerle. “We need to build these skills. If we can keep our customers happy, we can definitely build up the market.”
Opens the Door to International Opportunities
By providing communications services using Lync Server, Swisscom can open the door to more international companies that need to support offices outside Switzerland and Europe. “In Switzerland, we have hundreds of multinational companies with thousands of subsidiaries, and with Lync Server, we can manage their communications technology needs abroad with the same technology, all provided out of our data center,” says Kerle.
Provides Confidence with Internal Deployment
As a newcomer to the managed services market, Swisscom realized it needed a way to show customers that it understood the challenges they faced in integrating communications and collaboration technologies with business processes. It provided the best reference it could think of to exhibit it understanding: itself. “Our internal deployment builds up trust with customers, because we can tell them we have 15,000 users running the service,” says Kerle. “We also offer potential customers a free consulting package on how we did the deployment, how we trained users, and how we addressed the business’s concerns. We are open with the problems we faced and what we did so that we can help our customers through their own change management.”
Microsoft Lync Server 2010
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 ushers in a new connected user experience that transforms every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative, and engaging; and that is accessible from anywhere. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable communications system that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.
For more information about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, go to:
www.microsoft.com/lync