Head to head: T-Suite not too sweet for one

Nick Beaugeard, managing director, HubOne

First, our "mature" customers, either for regulatory or business process reasons, are asking for email archiving where they have a need for such a solution, but it's really simple to provide and implement with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) and Office 365 (365 makes it even easier).

The credibility of the solution, the platform and the Microsoft Data Centres (a $US4.5 billion investment) means we are confident providing this as a solution over all others including on-premise.

We haven't yet lost any deals to other platforms because of issues with email, services or archiving, but we're a company across everything we can offer, not just individual solutions.

Email archiving has certainly helped us close deals and has never been a deal breaker (in our experience). Some customers have, however, preferred to stay on-premise until the benefits of Office 365 are realised, or for sovereignty issues, but these are in a minority.

In my opinion, when selling enterprise messaging and collaboration, nothing comes close to the user experience, performance and security that the Microsoft portfolio provides.

I believe customers looking for enterprise class messaging and collaboration need to look closely at Microsoft, their partner ecosystem and the wealth of solutions available for business needs.

Most end users are used to Outlook and Exchange. Going to BPOS delivers the same end-user experience they are used to and eliminates the requirement for any organisational change management.

I'm not going to comment directly about Google; we don't lose deals to them so I have little experience there. But we look at all the options and have chosen Microsoft's cloud vision to bet our business on.

Next: Craig McLaughlin, founder and operations manager, BluePoint