Interview with CEO,
they sell to small medium size businesses.
Their value proposition in selling to customers is that by deploying their services their costs will go down, productivity will increase and they will mitigate risks. Office 365 is their principal service offering because costs decrease with exchange and email environment, productivity increases because they can manage the business better than IT. The exchange server also provides a back up which helps mitigate risks because of the highly redundant mail service is spread out across several servers. Champion SG is experiencing great results from this value proposition. They have sold over 250,000 seats to record after selling Office 365 for two years. Their customers are global, but the majority are based in the U.S.
Your customers that use O365, what are the features of the product that are most in demand?
The feature utilized most is Outlook, then it is a toss up between lync and sharepoint. These suite works because it is a familiar user interface that provides accessibility to all segments of the vertical. As More industires will move into the Cloud and Office 365, the current users seen most are retail, mobiles. In general it is a cross of people enjoying Cloud offerings from Microsoft.
What is your model in selling in the m-sku:
The Microsoft mantra is power of choice. Work with customer and Microsoft to map under 1 bill, bundle services, provide client 1 bill , don't want to do it this way then use a partner of record. There is a power in having the choice in how to deliver service offering of office 365 and able to get new customers beyond regular office. There are more and more clients looking to the partner cannel for advice and council. Shift accessibility of outsourcing from exchange to cloud.
client: what is email and strategy to transition to cloud, migrating to the coud is easiest with exchange because it has the exsiting capabilities of the software.
When you transitioned your own business to the cloud were there any tools that Microsoft offered to help in the transition?
I found DIF and DIG funing very helpful in funding the proof of concept for cutomer. It helped supplement expense of prrof of concept and trials. It was a phenomenol asset tool.
We can prove to you youll like this and pay partner to help them get there. Use tool we developed called Office 365 demand, help partners make money from value added services. Before in the onpremise offer partners would make money from continuing to manage the full service bundle. Now exchange takes care of that, bit with 365 command able to offer reporting, which allows for creation of a new revenue stream.
Company is Cloud essentials member, how is using Cloud Essentials helpful to your business?
With 22 office in 11 states and about 140 employees it is very critical that we can collapse all our email onto the Office 365 cloud. We used to use Domino, now we use the Cloud. We used to use Webex now we use Lunc. It honestly reduces my expenses as the CEO. Also, the benefit of using Office 365 internally is that everyone can demonstrate how to sue it when it comes time to sell it. They can demonstrate it on their mobile phone and slate. It is cool to see how positively it effected my businesss as a user of O365."
What is the response you hear from O365 customers?
They always want to know how to make more money with O365. I tell them it is through value added services. The example is 365 command.
If you have hundres of thousands of mailboxes, and partners now manage their own mailboxes thanks to cloud, then you manage the O365 environement.provide proof of concepts, assesments, trials, and migrations. This is the way to evolve thinking towards the cloud from the old business model of managing the whole office environment for the customer.