In Russia, SPAR has deployed its Microsoft Exchange corporate email in the cloud from ActiveCloud by Softline using the SaaS model.
SPAR is a famous Dutch brand operating in 35 countries across the globe, which represents a giant supermarket chain. SPAR International currently unites more than 12,000 stores in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The chain’s combined annual turnover is approximately EUR 32 billion.
At the beginning of 2012, SPAR’s technical specialists faced a series of difficulties associated with the deployment of email on local hardware at its partner, a hosting company. As a customer, SPAR was dissatisfied with the quality of hosting, frequent failures and response time of the provider’s technical support.
Since corporate email for SPAR is an important management tool and an integral part of the business, managers in Russia decided to move critical applications to the cloud, which should always be available for their distributed network. By outsourcing corporate mail, it was intended to free up technical resources and staff for their company. Such a business strategy was expected to enable the organization to focus on other core tasks and lead to significant savings and optimization of costs of equipment, licenses and email service maintenance.
When searching for a cloud provider, SPAR’s IT staff relied on the list of service providers recommended on the Microsoft website. A test period followed, during which SPAR’s technical specialists in Russia noted the high level of service and technical support offered by ActiveCloud by Softline. An important advantage of the cloud service supplier was its ability to integrate corporate mail in the cloud with Active Directory, which made it possible to make the work of users with the service as convenient as it gets. As a result of testing, it was decided to transfer all of the corporate mail to the cloud from ActiveCloud.
Anton Zolotusky, Technical Advisor at SPAR, says: “I really appreciate the excellent work done by ActiveCloud’s technical support service. Together with its specialists we have moved and set up the Microsoft Exchange corporate email. Since this work was performed on weekdays during working hours, it was critical for us to get the solution up and running quickly and without errors, which we managed in four hours. An additional convenience of the solution from ActiveCloud is the automation of the service provision mechanism, which allows you to pay and automatically get access to a service, control resource consumption and your balance.”
Incidentally, Microsoft Exchange (SaaS) is currently one of the most popular platforms among corporate clients enabling them to organize an effective email service. The system includes many additional services for the organization of corporate work.
Cloud solution benefits: a high level of reliability and performance is ensured, zero costs of servers and licenses, commissioning and maintenance time saved, availability of built-in data protection means (anti-spam and antivirus), which ensures compliance with the applicable legislative requirements. The solution is flexible in use and scalable for each customer: for example, you can order 50 mailboxes today and expand/cut their number tomorrow depending on business needs. Quality parameters are ensured by a number of innovative solutions designed by the developer of this high-tech product.
“When choosing ActiveCloud as our SaaS provider, the fact that the cloud solutions of this supplier are recommended by Microsoft was particularly important. Therefore, we were initially certain about the high professional level of the provider and grew even more confident during the cooperation process,” says Anton Zolotusky.
Igor Korman, General Director of ActiveCloud (ActiveHost RU LLC), says: “We take special pride in the fact that such a large international company entrusted us with the migration of its corporate email. Innovative SaaS solutions will become an excellent addition to the organization of SPAR business processes and will give additional impetus to further successful development of this powerful company.”
