“The studies conducted since the introduction of the service on the market show that SoHos or SMEs using ‘My Office’ can decrease their operational costs by up to 40%, saving on travel costs, phone bills, or administrative paper costs. Companies can also cut their communications expenditure by up to 50%.”
George Makowski, Chief Commercial Officer, Business Segment, Romtelecom.
Business Needs
Romtelecom has been present in the Romanian market since 1930, and today is majority held by Greece’s OTE Group, which is itself part-owned by Deutsche Telekom. As the primary integrated telecommunications operator in Romania with a strong portfolio of innovative services, Romtelecom searched the market for a unified communications solution to better serve the business needs of its dynamic business customers.
The operator required a fully integrated communications solution, combining all aspects of voice and data services, in order to broaden its existing Business Solutions offerings - primarily targeting the SME segment (over 120 000 customers) but also enterprises with a significant mobile or external workforce . From the outset, Romtelecom’s goal has been to assist businesses in Romania to become more productive and competitive in their markets, which it hopes to achieve by offering them more streamlined communications.
“We wanted to offer an enterprise-level solution for SoHos and SMEs with up to 100 employees. The implementation of such services inhouse is expensive and up to now only large companies, with thousands of employees and tens or hundreds of thousands of Euros in IT budget could afford it. We were looking for a solution to change this and boost productivity and efficiency of SMEs on the Romanian market” – said George Makowski, Chief Commercial Officer, Business Segment, Romtelecom.
Solutions
Following an extensive tender process, Romtelecom chose the leading regional Cloud Services provider, CE On-Demand to help it find a solution to satisfy the growing business needs of its customers.
CE On-Demand offered Romtelecom a unified communications (“UC”) package which satisfies all messaging, collaboration and communication needs of customers at an affordable price. The integrated communications solution comprises Microsoft’s Exchange, Office Communications Server (“OCS”) and SharePoint, combined with an Automatic Backup solution for regular backup and safe recovery of data.
In October 2010 Romtelecom became the first telecoms operator in Central and Eastern Europe to offer Microsoft’s 2010 portfolio to its business customers, having achieved a go-to-market timeframe of just 8 weeks; this rapid deployment was made possible through the very close cooperation between Romtelecom’s internal team with CE On-Demand’s technical staff, and was integrated by the use of CE On-Demand’s Cloud Services Manager which also facilitated the provisioning and activation framework.
Romtelecom’s customers are now able to use enterprise level services such as mobile e-mail, shared address books, shared calendars, and shared task lists, all with ActiveSync between PCs and mobile devices, thus providing non-stop information flow even for mobile staff. Subscribers to Romtelecom’s UC-boosted portfolio ‘My Office’ are able to use fixed and mobile instant messaging within their organisation or externally, as well as having access to audio, video and rich web conferencing services, even for multiple users. Subscribers are also able to store and manage files and other company materials within their own, personalized collaborative portal. Romtelecom’s ’My Office‘ is available through multiple devises (desktop, laptop, mobile phone) and through any type of Internet connection (fixed or mobile).
Viktor Kovacs, Chief Operating Officer of CE On-Demand said: “We are pleased and proud to be the Cloud Services partner of Romtelecom. This relationship is fundamental to our partner-focused cloud strategy and we are dedicated to support Romtelecom in providing cost-effective and secure messaging, collaboration and communication services to its customers, thus helping businesses in Romania become more productive and competitive – in-country as well as globally.”
Benefits
CE On-Demand’s offering illustrates that in the age of cloud computing productivity, mobility and efficiency do not have to be the privilege of large enterprises with sizeable budgets. Unified Communications from the cloud offers substantial long-term cost-savings with limited or no up-front capital investment, that business customers may easily scale as their business grows.
“The studies conducted since the introduction of the service on the market show that SoHoOs or SMEs using ‘My Office’ can decrease their operational costs by up to 40%, saving on travel costs, phone bills, or administrative paper costs. Companies can also cut their communications expenditure by up to 50%.” – explained George Makowski, Chief Commercial Officer, Business Segment, Romtelecom.
Using Microsoft’s latest and most innovative unified communications technology also allows businesses to become more mobile, as well as to boost their productivity and consequently helping them grow more successful. Market analysts have estimated that users of such services save an average of 30 minutes per day, which they are able to spend on other, company-critical activities, thereby improving staff productivity.
“Providing the Romanian market with best of breed cloud computing technologies and services is a top priority for Microsoft. The partnership with Romtelecom and Central Europe On-Demand is a great milestone in this respect on the market and opens additional great business potential for our partners. We think ‘My Office’ from Romtelecom is a great offering for small and medium businesses. These services combined will capitalize on the personal productivity obtained with Microsoft Office software clients in SMBs and will enable improved communication and collaboration at the organizational level.”- said Ronald Binkofski, General Manager, Microsoft Romania.