Cost Control
A well-executed Managed Services strategy for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync allows you to decrease your overall IT budget while at the same time improving the performance and uptime of e-mail, collaboration and unified communications systems.
Here are the top five ways that our approach to Communications and Collaboration Managed Services has positive economic benefits for our customers:
Personnel savings: Labor makes up approximately two-thirds of today's messaging, collaboration and unified communications (UC) costs and those IT personnel dedicated to UC infrastructure support represent lost productivity in other IT areas. By outsourcing non-core competencies such as e-mail management to Avanade, valuable in-house IT professionals can be allocated to revenue-generating projects that directly benefit the business.
Stress testing: Before pushing down any patches from Microsoft or 3rd party systems, Avanade first tests them using a rigorous process designed to ensure maximum uptime in the customer environment. This system not only takes the pilot/testing costs away from the customer but also ensures that the customer does not incur any downtime costs for patches or software updates that may take down the Exchange, SharePoint or Lync system if incorrectly applied.
Single sourcing: Avanade provides for a full portfolio of Microsoft UC-Stack-related monitoring, management, archiving, back-up, and more. Our customers do not need to “split” messaging, collaboration and UC services between multiple vendors. In addition, Avanade adds a number of different services into its core subscription pricing which often may need to be purchased separately elsewhere. For example, backups, patch management and even the ability to continue to leverage existing hardware are all obvious cost saving mechanisms.
Migration and deployment: Avanade has a wealth of experience and a knowledge base collection of how to best architect and perform various types of migrations and deployments to Exchange, SharePoint or Lync. This expertise, combined with the Avanade specialized set-up and clustering services, allows us to get you up and running very quickly and at a lower cost.
Microsoft UC stack expertise: As a result of the Avanade investment in Exchange, SharePoint and Lync expertise companies can save on education and training costs for IT personnel. Further, because Avanade also invests heavily in the R&D aspects of our monitoring and management, you achieve internal development cost savings as well.