Microsoft reseller HubOne recently received a call from a small, 12-person company wanting to move to the vendor's cloud services platform, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
HubOne has already notched up a string of migrations to BPOS through Telstra T-Suite, however this deal was different: The customer wasn't in Australia.
"I just finished the migration 10 minutes ago," Nick Beaugeard, HubOne's managing director, said late Tuesday. "We can do it without touching Telstra. It's just us and Microsoft."
Beaugeard said he had met the company, Xynergies LLC, at a Microsoft conference. Xynergies was a Microsoft contractor that had ditched Microsoft Office and moved to Google Apps. However, staff needed the functionality of Exchange as they had to work closely with Microsoft employees.
The company, based in Microsoft's home town of Redmond - had 12 mailboxes with about 6.5GB of email in each. Beaugeard said it had taken just an hour and a half to migrate the data from Google's data centre to Microsoft's. "It never touched their network."
Selling to a company based overseas was easier than selling to an Australian company, Beaugeard said. "Tiny companies in Australia expect you to see them. [But] if they know you're offshore then they don't expect you to see them." He used Microsoft Live Meeting to close the sale.
HubOne used the tool Migration Whiz, which "makes it really simple to move from or to BPOS, on-premise or otherwise", Beaugeard said. "A lot of companies are bringing out the tools to move the customer from wherever they want to go."
Migrating email to the cloud using these tools was "cheap as chips" compared to on-premises migration, Beaugeard said. HubOne charged $100 a mailbox with a minimum price of $2500 and still made a "healthy" margin.
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