BACK TO THE FUTURE SAIF ALWAN, MANAGING DIRECTOR AT IT COMPANY FUTUREX, DISCUSSES HOW TRANSITIONING FROM MICROSOFT’S ENTERPRISE AGREEMENT (EA) TO ITS CLOUD SOLUTION PROVIDER (CSP) AGREEMENT HAS OPTIMIZED LICENSING COSTS AND EMPOWERED FUTURE GROUP TO HAVE GREATER FLEXIBILITY IN TERMS OF LICENSING.
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utureX was a company that was created 1 year ago following a consensus that the IT department at Future Pipe Industries had reached a level of peak maturity. Alwan said, “Future Pipe Industries is a privately-owned global manufacturing company which is part of a larger group called Future Group. Over the past decade, we built the skills and expertise of the IT department through the deployment and management of several complex IT solutions. We had reached an advanced level of IT maturity so we took the decision to spin the IT department into a separate business called FutureX so that we could offer our skills and expertise to third party customers.” Alwan spearheaded a major project which was to take Future Group from a Microsoft EA to a CSP agreement. He explained the complexities involved in the transition. “It took several months of planning as you’re effectively changing your entire Microsoft licensing
model. In addition to this, you obviously need to get up to speed on of the various Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license types and establish and identify what the differences between them are so you can select the right package mix for your users. We have different types of users so it’s important you pick the right packages. This took several months of planning and we did that with Redington, using them as our distributor and FutureX was the reseller. We’re now the reseller into the group and to our third-party customers.” Alwan stated that there was no cultural resistance from within the group on the transition from the EA to the cloud as they were already familiar with Microsoft. He added, “There was no resistance because they didn’t feel any change. We were already using Office 365 and there was a familiarity with Microsoft that already existed. There was no service disruption at all and our users didn’t realize that we had completely changed the licensing model.” The Managing Director at FutureX disclosed that Microsoft was heavily involved with them on their journey to the cloud as they needed to get up to speed
CUSTOMER: FUTURE GROUP
Customer Objective
Why Microsoft 365?
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Transition seamlessly from EA to CSP agreement
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Flexibility in licensing
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Enhanced offering for end-users
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Robust security and reliability
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Removal of long-term commitments and optimization of license costs
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Easy for internal teams and users to collaborate
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VALUE STORIES|ISSUE 4
