In 2008, the Royal Mail began evaluating cloud computing solutions for 28,000 employees, primarily to migrate from a legacy on-premise email system
As reported in Computing Magazine – Cloud Computing case study: Royal Mail Group (RMG)
In late 2008, Royal Mail Group (RMG) began evaluating cloud computing solutions for 28,000 employees currently using a legacy IBM Lotus Notes system. Vendors investigated included Microsoft, Google and Lotus Live. A nine-month appraisal of three options was completed: retain the current system with minor upgrades, migrate to a new version of Lotus Notes, or switch to Microsoft Exchange Server.
After the evaluation, RMG chose Microsoft Business Productivity Online Dedicated (BPOS-D) based on recommendations from its outsourcing partner CSC and its own research. Costs savings are quoted as a major factor but the head of infrastructure management also stressed the need to “improve collaobration and give staff new more efficient and more functional communication and collaboration tools”:
“The average on-premises mail box within Lotus Notes was constrained by disk, because point disk and backup capacity is quite expensive. So most staff had a 250MB inbox file under Lotus Notes. Everybody’s got 5GB now in the cloud… Some people used to have to do a phenomenal amount of housekeeping, but now they don’t have to do this they are much more productive.”
– Adrian Steele, Head of Infrastructure Management, The Royal Mail Group
BPOS standards for Business Productivity Online Service. It was originally based on the 2007 range of Microsoft products including Office, Exchange and SharePoint, later upgraded to the 2010 versions. It is available as a standard subscription service or as a dedicated plan. The dedicated plan uses isolated server resources within Microsoft’s data centres and is typically only available to large enterprises.
Source: Computing Magazine, May 2011
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