What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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Being a Cloud Partner with Microsoft is completely different. We had to go through the total process of signing up and getting our certifications via Cloud Partner Program when we started to resell it. We have separate account managers and technical account managers etc.
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My original reason for asking this question was not due to a specific customer. It was more the what would you need to see to get your boss to migrate. For some it just doesn't make sense from a business or technical prospective and that I can see but there are some where it doesn't make any sense at all from any perspective.
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@minion-queen Really sorry for sending the thread off-track. My boss, the Finance Director, doesn't care and would go with whatever I recommended. I'm lucky like that. He actually prefers the subscription model to perpetual licencing. A lot of other bosses I know have a phobia about "the cloud", which is a common reason for not going with O365. I reckon this phobia is more prevalent amongst non-IT people.
I do have a mild phobia about doing any kind of cloud business with non-European providers, rightly or wrongly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy there are no upgrade penalties and total flexibility within the enterprise E plans which includes hosted Exchange.
The specific penalty of opting to take a small or mid size business plan is that there are size caps and no flexibility. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Stick with E and your concerns go away.
Why do they even have the other levels then? Why not just make everything SIMPLE one level, all E with steps on that level. They seem to be adding needless complication or limitations to what, maybe save the customer a few bucks, and make MS have to work that much harder to product two or three products instead of just one GREAT one?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy there are no upgrade penalties and total flexibility within the enterprise E plans which includes hosted Exchange.
The specific penalty of opting to take a small or mid size business plan is that there are size caps and no flexibility. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Stick with E and your concerns go away.
Why do they even have the other levels then? Why not just make everything SIMPLE one level, all E with steps on that level. They seem to be adding needless complication or limitations to what, maybe save the customer a few bucks, and make MS have to work that much harder to product two or three products instead of just one GREAT one?
Because SMBs desire these things and ask for them. Same as SBS. You can't blame a vendor for offering both a good and a bad product. If the market didn't demand the bad products they wouldn't sell. Microsoft doesn't push, recommend or require in any way that you avoid the E levels and they provide a partner ecosystem to ensure that you get good advice.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@minion-queen Really sorry for sending the thread off-track. My boss, the Finance Director, doesn't care and would go with whatever I recommended. I'm lucky like that. He actually prefers the subscription model to perpetual licencing. A lot of other bosses I know have a phobia about "the cloud", which is a common reason for not going with O365. I reckon this phobia is more prevalent amongst non-IT people.
I do have a mild phobia about doing any kind of cloud business with non-European providers, rightly or wrongly.
All enterprise email comes from American-based providers for better or worse. Like NTG, Microsoft has a fully European subsidiary. So they are as European as anyone else. But the parents are always American. Email is just an area Europe has not invested in.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Being a Cloud Partner with Microsoft is completely different. We had to go through the total process of signing up and getting our certifications via Cloud Partner Program when we started to resell it. We have separate account managers and technical account managers etc.
That's bad terminology. You can't resell Office 365. NTG is an advisor of Office 365. That is the difference between the programs. Gold partners are part of the reseller program. Premier partners are the gold equivalent in the advisory program.
No matter who your partner is, the service is always direct from Microsoft.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Indeed. I wish I'd asked your advice at the time! Getting a good partner seems to be key to Office 365. I don't believe any of the Microsoft partners I work with offer Office 365, so I'll need to head to the market to find someone new. That was another point of annoyance: I assumed that my local Microsoft Gold partner could help me out, but it turned out he couldn't. Why?
NTG UK is a British Office 365 partner
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Sold!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Sold!
@stefuk can assist you with services based in the UK. And @huw3481 is the primary Office 365 technical person there.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Being a Cloud Partner with Microsoft is completely different. We had to go through the total process of signing up and getting our certifications via Cloud Partner Program when we started to resell it. We have separate account managers and technical account managers etc.
That's bad terminology. You can't resell Office 365. NTG is an advisor of Office 365. That is the difference between the programs. Gold partners are part of the reseller program. Premier partners are the gold equivalent in the advisory program.
No matter who your partner is, the service is always direct from Microsoft.
Yes, the partner I work with for Microsoft licensing has stated that basically, they get marked as the partner of record on the account, and get their credit or whatever. But all services and such are MS direct.
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Exactly. As the partner we get access to help manage the account, change visibility, ability to escalate issues for support, etc. but the end service and even payments all go to Microsoft. No money goes between the client and the advisor (unless they buy other services of course.)
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For us it would be ITAR compliance for e-mail at a reasonable price. It's not cost efficient unless you have thousands of users. But we enjoy the ProPlus software licensing with O365 (newly purchased).
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Someone on SW just asked about Office 365 and everyone was like "stick with E plans."
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My company is considering paying an outside consultant they've used for years to upgrade their Exchange server. I will need to learn more about 365 before challenging such a proposal.
Long story for company politics, but I am still new to the grand scheme of things with this company. Price is everything and functionality is secondary. Oh and they are scared of the word cloud as this consultant seems to be overly cautious in any sort of cloud-based service/program. He even advised against using Teamviewer/LogMeIn to create support sessions on rare occasions.
Good news is they don't make decisions quickly at all so I should have time to learn the necessary information and advise appropriately. Any elementary quick breakdowns for me? I appreciate it.
What would it take my boss? A hell of a speech and a price sheet to back it up. He glazes over 30 seconds into explaining the improvements of anything from my experience.
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Easy sell:
- save money
- better security
- more features
- forward looking rather than backwards looking
- less risk should the company shrink
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@scottalanmiller said:
Easy sell:
- save money
I want to agree with this, but Exchange no longer exists in a single server vacuum. If the customer already has a DC, and a VM host to run it on, where's the savings? True, it's not SAS70 compliant, but SMBs don't need that kind of uptime normally.
Now, if you have a catastrophic failure and need to bring in outside help to solve it and you're email is down for days, OK sure, you might be able to get the price to be more expensive than O365, but how often does that really happen?
I'll give you all the other points, but saving money isn't one I've seen be the case.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Easy sell:
- save money
I want to agree with this, but Exchange no longer exists in a single server vacuum. If the customer already has a DC, and a VM host to run it on, where's the savings? True, it's not SAS70 compliant, but SMBs don't need that kind of uptime normally.
Now, if you have a catastrophic failure and need to bring in outside help to solve it and you're email is down for days, OK sure, you might be able to get the price to be more expensive than O365, but how often does that really happen?
I'll give you all the other points, but saving money isn't one I've seen be the case.
If you run the numbers, the things that you mention were never driving costs. It is labor, mailbagging, AV, licensing, backup, storage, etc. that cost the most. You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
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I know of no shop with business class email beating $4/user/month. They often hide the cost on other budgets but it is there. SMBs don't do good financial analysis and often don't see where there money is going.
