Two of Microsoft’s corporate clients spoke of their experiences working with the Redmond software giant at this year’s Cloud Computing World conference, which took place in London this week. Both have utilised two very different ‘as a Service’ products from Microsoft to address their respective situations, and both are giants in their respective fields.
The world’s second largest pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) tendered for a new email and instant messaging system to replace an ageing system described by Alastair Robertson, VP Information Workspace at GSK as “creaking at the seams”. The company wanted to implement an ‘information workspace’ that fostered better communication within the company and with external entities, coped with an accelerated rate of change at a corporate level, and simplified the operation of information flow as a whole.
In essence, information workplace shared many of the qualities of Cloud Computing. Robertson described the need for “a contextual work environment accessible from anywhere, at anytime, with any device”. At the end of the tendering process, GSK decided upon Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of the company’s Software + Services hybrid strategy.
At a time when the pharmaceuticals industry has lost up to $800 billion in market capitalisation since the start of the decade, cost-cutting is also a priority for GSK. By implementing Microsoft’s BPOS it’s estimated the company could make a saving of 30% on IT on a pure cost basis over 5 years. According to Robertson, BPOS offered the promise of a streamlined and flexible system, which also allowed scalability when required. For instance, GSK acquired Stiefel Laboratories in July 2009, which meant a jump in users. After speaking to Microsoft, the BPOS scaled up to include the new users far quicker than the ageing system.
Despite the size of GlaxoSmithKline (which declared a turnover of over £24 billion in 2008 and employs over 100,000 people) BPOS’ ability to deliver the simple, flexible, and standard environment had its downside - namely, a standard service level agreement (SLA) that left little room to change.
The development and deployment of BPOS within GSK is scheduled for completion by the end of 2010, and began 6 months ago, by which time the system will be rolled out to 123,000 users worldwide. GlaxoSmithKine’s dallying with Cloud products doesn’t end with email and collaborative tools; the company is currently tendering for a unified communication solution, with Robertson also conceding that despite current concerns over Cloud data security, “running whole science experiments in the Cloud is inevitable.”
Guinea pigs in the Cloud
Kerny Ustrup, senior director of group IT vendor management at global conglomerate AP Moller-Maersk (APMM), spoke of the challenges of being a guinea pig for Microsoft’s so-called ‘Outlook Exchange as a Service’. Like GSK, APMM required the migration to a new email platform, streamlining its system from three products (aged between 2 and 30 years old) to a single robust environment. A request for proposal was released, with four submissions including one from Microsoft.
The Redmond proposal was successful, and Moller-Maersk became only the fifth customer to sign up to the system. After 2 years of preparatory work, the migration is now underway, despite Ustrup revealing “Microsoft wasn’t mature enough at the start of the project.” The preparation ahead of migration process lasted longer than anticipated, certainly from the legal side. It also took 3 attempts before APMM and Microsoft got the process right. “We have spent so much time and so many man hours prepping this,” Ustrup added. “We are aware the services are still maturing and there are areas where Microsoft can improve its offerings.”
Microsoft’s contract with APMM is currently 5 years, and including monthly invoicing, daily back up, and data replication between data centres. As a result of being an early adopter, the company has received enhanced sponsor attention, with appearances from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The new system also allows for accelerated deployment speed capability from 200 to 2000 mailboxes a day on request, as well as added flexibility to renegotiating the contract according to Moller-Maersk’s changing needs and focus.
Like GSK, one of the big advantages of switching to a new system was cost saving. Ustrup described how “the cost will be reduced to half; going to a standard solution [meant] we were able to cut costs significantly.” Moller-Maersk is reticent about going into significant figures, but given the current system caters for multiple email addresses per user and its 120k employees, the costs (and therefore savings) are likely to be massive. The story of migration for both GSK and APMM are similar in more than each company’s respective cost savings, including the difficulty in changing a standard IT solution. “If you buy something from the cloud, you do not change it,” explained Ustrup. “It’s difficult for us [Moller-Maersk] to accept that, because it meant we had to change the way we used the product.”
Despite the drawbacks of Outlook Exchange as a Service, namely the use of Moller-Maersk as a guinea pig and the struggles to implement solid risk and change managements (something Microsoft is currently working on), Ustrup drew on the positives of migrating to Redmond’s service. “We could not rely on a small company that had only been around for a few years; we needed a company we could convince our board would be around for the duration of the contract," he said, adding: “We chose Microsoft because they would survive, and would add to the system over time.”
As for the future use of Cloud services at APMM, Ustrup is less optimistic: “We do not intent to transfer complex applications to the Cloud except for basic communication.” Instead, the solution many come from the consolidation of the company’s own data centres, and forming a private Cloud of its own.
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