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ClearPointe built its business on the remote management of client infrastructure. But some of the small to mid-sized business ClearPointe serves were not taking advantage of newer messaging and collaboration technologies because of the high cost of building the infrastructure and licensing the software. When ClearPointe began to offer the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services, it found an excited receptivity among its clients. Arkansas Physicians Management, Inc., seized the opportunity to move forward with an e-mail migration project that had been languishing for years. This expanded service provider role enables ClearPointe not only to deliver results much faster and with virtually no up-front costs, but also to achieve increased revenues and an expanded set of business relationships with existing and new clients alike.
ClearPointe of Little Rock, Arkansas, provides remote network management for small and mid-sized clients in the banking, financial services, health care, education, and government sectors. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, ClearPointe relieves customers worldwide of the burden of supporting and maintaining their servers, networks, applications, and even their desktop operating systems. While its clients own their IT resources and house them on premise, ClearPointe remotely monitors and manages the servers and their applications using Microsoft System Center technology. It is an ideal arrangement for companies that need a reliable infrastructure to support the business, but do not have—or do not want to retain—local resources to support their infrastructure.
But in working with their clients, ClearPointe analysts noted that some who would benefit significantly from migrating to more robust communications and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft® Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 were reluctant or even unable to make the necessary up-front investments. Even with ClearPointe managing their infrastructure, the cost and time required to plan, purchase, install, and implement new hardware and software onsite was more than these companies choose to support. As one frustrated client put it, “I’m tired of having to buy a new server for everything we want to do here.”
One long-time ClearPointe customer needed a new way to meet its growing messaging and collaboration needs. Arkansas Physicians Management, Inc. (APMI) provides management and financial services for physicians and clinics. While its business was expanding, its use of technology was not keeping pace. For example, the company still outsourced its e-mail. “They were still using a POP3-based account similar to Hotmail®,” says Bob Longo, ClearPointe Director of Sales and Business Development. “They had been trying to bring Microsoft Exchange Server in-house for a long time.” ClearPointe had proposed a traditional on-premise solution, which included APMI purchasing the servers and software licenses, but APMI had balked. The initial capital investment, estimated at $25,000 for hardware, software, and services, was prohibitive, even with ClearPointe managing the infrastructure.
“They knew the benefits of shared calendaring and everything else that Microsoft Exchange Server brings to the table,” Longo notes. “They just couldn’t get over the initial deployment and licensing expenses.”
Fortunately for APMI, however, ClearPointe soon found a way to offer the functionality that APMI wanted at a much more attractive price point.
That solution emerged when ClearPointe announced to its customers that it was making available to them the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services. This offering makes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Microsoft Office Communications Online, and Microsoft SharePoint Online available to companies as a subscription-based online service. Because Microsoft actually hosts and manages the servers and the software, companies such as APMI can take advantage of this enterprise-class software without any initial capital outlay.
Upon announcing that it could support companies using the Business Productivity Online Suite, ClearPointe’s customer response was immediate and enthusiastic. “At our annual users conference, we showcased the Business Productivity Online Suite,” recalls Longo, “The folks at APMI just jumped up and were practically shouting, ‘This is it! This is what we’ve been waiting for!’”
And the Business Productivity Online Suite provides many advantages in addition to lower initial costs.
The reliability and built-in redundancy of having core services hosted by Microsoft is one such advantage. Because the services run in a Microsoft-managed data center rather than a customer’s site, they are accessible and available from virtually anywhere in the world. “When our customers look at online services, they know that connectivity is never going to be an issue; they know their data is intact and recoverable—they just don’t have to worry about it,” says Scott Long, Network Design Architect at ClearPointe. “They don’t have to be responsible for keeping their back-ups, for any kind of fault tolerance, or for system security. All of that attracts them.”
Another selling point for ClearPointe’s customers is the scalability and synergy of the integrated services offered through the Business Productivity Online Suite. APMI, for example, currently distributes large files as e mail attachments. For a low, per-month, per-user subscription fee the company can take advantage not only of Exchange Online for e–mail, but also SharePoint Online for document sharing and Live Meeting for conferencing and collaboration.
For ClearPointe clients such as APMI, the new offering from Microsoft Online Services makes enterprise-class services available and affordable. For ClearPointe itself, partnering with Microsoft to provide these services enables faster response, broader reach, and a whole new way to grow revenues.
Traditional implementations can be excruciating to plan and manage—both for the vendor and for the client. Prior to introducing the Microsoft Exchange Online option, ClearPointe and APMI had discussed and debated an Exchange Server migration for more than 18 months. The cost and scale of that endeavor was too much for APMI and the project never got off the table.
With Microsoft Exchange Online, though, that scale shrinks dramatically. Without the need to size, acquire, and configure an on-premise infrastructure, ClearPointe clients can quickly realize the benefits of a technology upgrade. A quick business decision is easy to make when potentially huge upfront costs are replaced by low monthly subscription costs. And once that decision is made, connecting clients to the right online services is little more than flipping a switch: they can be sending and receiving e-mail through Exchange Online within hours, not months. “It is a wonderful way for us to get clients moving along quicker,” says Longo.
With that speed and simplicity of implementation, Longo notes that ClearPointe no longer has to commit its skilled technical staff to server and software installations. “I think that is one of the things that excites us the most. It was painful to put senior engineers on some of these migrations. Now they can spend that time on research, development, and higher productivity projects.”
ClearPointe sees a huge market opportunity in moving clients completely to the cloud and the Business Productivity Online Suite is at the center of to capitalizing on it.
“With these online services, we can create a total desktop solution that doesn’t require anything on the customer side,” says Longo. The Business Productivity Online Suite logically extends ClearPointe’s core strategy of serving small to mid-sized businesses that do not want to manage their servers and software, while maintaining ClearPointe’s position as a single point of contact for each customer.
“We can now go to our customers and say, ‘We’re going to offer you this complete productivity solution. We can manage the services for you. We’re going to guarantee the level of performance of these applications. And, we can do all of this at a fixed price.’ That’s something that they’ve been waiting to hear,” Longo says.
It’s the ability to offer managed solutions at a fixed price, Longo notes, that is of particular interest to ClearPointe customers. “Clients know that we aren’t out to sell them what we have in our stock room or have some sort of vested interest in what they buy from us,” says Longo. “They just care that the service is online and it’s managed. So for us, the ability to offer these Microsoft services online is a real competitive advantage for ClearPointe.”
Longo is also confident that the margins for ClearPointe will get better and better as their clientele for the Business Productivity Online Suite grows.
For starters, by freeing customers from large up-front expenditures for hardware and software, Microsoft Online Services enables them to invest in other services and activities for greater business value. ClearPointe anticipates that some of those liberated investment dollars will come back to ClearPointe in the form of new projects.
“It might mean they can add additional servers for us to manage instead of the dollars they would spend on hardware to implement Exchange Server,” predicts Scott Long.
In addition, ClearPointe anticipates an ongoing revenue stream from supporting the online services. “The big draw for us is being able to bundle our management services with the services in the Business Productivity Online Suite. It’s not a one-time sale and that‘s it. A Microsoft Partner gets recurring revenue from reselling this offering, and we can manage the service for our clients and add our service fees on a per-user, per-month basis,” Longo says.
Finally, Microsoft Online Services opens up a new set of business opportunities with clients, especially in the areas of SharePoint Online consulting, online migration, and integration. In addition to document management, for example, APMI is very interested in SharePoint Online as an intranet platform. Scott Long observes, “We can add value there by providing a SharePoint Online solution very quickly, utilizing Microsoft Templates.”
These are areas that ClearPointe sees having huge growth potential, and ClearPointe executives are confident that the kinds of insights that emerge from working more closely with clients will put them in a position to offer even more new revenue-generating services.
The advantages of the Business Productivity Online Suite for companies such as Arkansas Physicians Management, Inc., go beyond reduced investment costs and improved reliability and redundancy. By expanding their long-term relationship with ClearPointe, they know they have a local trusted advisor and advocate, backed by the power and resources of Microsoft.
For Microsoft partner ClearPointe, that relationship is the most valuable asset of all. “Our clients really don’t care where the data or the applications are coming from, so long as they are managed at a guaranteed fixed cost and a guaranteed level of performance. With the Business Productivity Online Suite, we know we can provide that for them,” says Longo. “We could not be more excited.”
Microsoft Online Services is a business-class communications and collaboration software offering delivered as a subscription service, hosted by Microsoft, and sold with partners. These services help make it easier for customers to rapidly and cost-effectively access the most up-to-date technologies, and are designed for rapid deployment to provide customers with streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security.
For IT staff, Microsoft Online Services helps reduce the burden of performing routine IT management tasks such as installation, provisioning, ongoing maintenance, patches, updates, and upgrades, making it possible for them to spend more time on initiatives that move the business forward. These services are backed by strong SLAs and are designed to meet the regulatory compliance and reliability needs of enterprise customers. On a technical level, the services boast the sophistication and reliability that customers expect from Microsoft, which continues to invest heavily in building data centers to support these services.
