Women’s fashion designer BCBG picks Office 365

Leading women's fashion designer BCBGMAXAZRIAGROUP offers premier fashion brands for women in more than 1,200 BCBG stores in 45 countries. When employees began running into issues sending photos and other large attachments via email, the retailer decided it needed to address its limited email storage issue by moving to the cloud.

"We are not a technology company and don't want to invest a lot of capital in IT," says Kent Fuller, Director of IT Infrastructure Services at BCBG. "We saw cloud computing as a good way to spread costs, pay for what we use as we need it, and make email-infrastructure management somebody else's responsibility."

When BCBG initially decided to upgrade their messaging and collaboration tools, several employees tried Google Apps. However, they encountered some unexpected challenges as Google Apps capabilities didn't work for all their employees.

"We thought that most of our users could get by with Google Apps," says Fuller. "But we found that the capabilities in Google were adequate for less than 25 percent of our employees. With Office 365, we had the flexibility to pay for minimal subscriptions for some employees and still provide the full power of Microsoft Office to people who need it."

BCBG relies heavily on Office products and found that Google Apps lacked the rich functionality that Microsoft Office provides. They ultimately selected Office 365 because they needed an environment that was familiar, user-friendly and customizable based on their needs.

"We needed something our employees could adopt now with minimum disruption to day-to-day business," says Fuller. "We can use Office 365 to deliver an enterprise-level solution that is familiar and easy to use."

After switching to Office 365, BCBG experienced a notable increase in productivity while reducing the burden on IT, allowing them to focus on more important business projects. All of this was achieved under a manageable cost structure; in choosing a cloud solution, BCBG was able to avoid up to $300,000 in upfront expenses.

Want to learn more about BCBG's move to the cloud with Office 365?  You can read the full story online or visit the Why Microsoft Blog.