Microsoft Office 365

Customer Solution Case Study

Wipro moves 125,000 mailboxes to the

cloud in record time of 18 weeks

Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Professional servicesIT
services
Customer Profile
Wipro is a global information
technology, consulting, and
business process services company.
Based in Bengaluru (Bangalore),
India, it serves customers all over
the world and has revenues of
US$7.5 billion.
Business Situation
More customers were asking Wipro
to help them migrate to softwareas-a-service models, and Wipro
wanted more modern
communications tools for its own
workforce.
Solution
Wipro migrated 125,000 employees
to Microsoft Office 365 while
keeping 31,000 employees on onpremises email.
Benefits
Migrate 125,000 mailboxes to the
cloud in 18 weeks
Give employees much larger
mailboxes
Help employees be productive

The work we did to migrate 125,000 mailboxes to the cloud

in just 18 weeks was pretty amazing. We can now talk to
customers with confidence about large-scale cloud
deployments.
Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer, Wipro Limited

Wipro helps its customers transform their businesses

using cloud-based IT services. To provide better counsel,
and to transform its own business, Wipro deployed
Microsoft Office 365 for 125,000 employees while
keeping 31,000 mailboxes on-premises. With more
modern communications tools and ready access to
information and to one another, Wipro employees are
more productive and can implement hybrid cloud
projects with ease and confidence.

Our migration to Office

365 was not just one of the
fastest by any company in
the space to date, but it was
also a completely seamless
experience across various
geographies, with zero
disruption to Wipro
employees.
Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer,
Wipro Limited

One of the leading information

technology, consulting, and business
process services companies, Wipro
supports a customer base of Global
500 companies, many of which are
transforming their businesses with
software as a service (SaaS) solutions.
To partner with these customers,
Wipro needed experience in deploying
large-scale cloud solutions. If we
havent implemented large-scale
SaaS systems ourselves, its hard to
speak with conviction to customers,
says Raja Ukil, Chief Information
Officer at Wipro Limited.

mailboxes on-premises running on

Exchange Server. The on-premises
mailboxes included shared mailboxes,
conference room and applicationspecific email IDs, and mailboxes that
were in compliance with the US
government data security regulations
and customer contractual
requirements.

Wipro also knew that modern cloudbased solutions would help its own
business. Younger employees were
dissatisfied with the standard
communications and collaboration
tools. They wanted tools that were
more mobile and social. And the cost
of maintaining conventional email,
collaboration, and telephony systems
was rising.

We looked at other solutions, but our

IT staff and end users were well
versed in Microsoft products, and we
didnt want to introduce changes that
would cause disruption, says Arup
Sanyal, Program Manager at Wipro
Limited. Wipro also liked the security
and compliance features of Office
365. Were very excited about the
eDiscovery and Legal Hold
capabilities we get with Microsoft
Exchange Online, Sanyal says.
Using them will help us simplify
compliance with regulatory
requirements.

Move to the cloud at scale

To reduce the cost of core IT systems,
free its IT staff to focus on revenueproducing solutions, and equip its
global workforce with modern
productivity tools, Wipro decided to
deploy Microsoft Office 365. This was
a hybrid implementation, done
alongside its existing Microsoft
Exchange Server 2010 infrastructure.
Office 365 is a suite of cloud-based
Microsoft Office applications, email,
videoconferencing, file storage, file
sharing, and social networking tools.
The hybrid deployment involved
moving 125,000 mailboxes to Office
365 and leaving the remaining 31,000

As a result of our upfront planning

work, we were able to migrate 2,500
mailboxes a day10,000 to 15,000
mailboxes a weekto the cloud
without incident, Ukil says.

Wipro spent several months upfront

on migration planning and change
management, and it engaged
Microsoft Services Consulting for
assistance. It then rolled out a few
services of Office 365 at a time,
beginning with email and Yammer, an
enterprise social network. The
deployment team automated
everything possible and made the
switchover extremely easy for
employees. Wipro created a
command center to support

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Our adoption of Microsoft

Office 365 ProPlus means I
have the latest Office
applications available with
the same native experience
on my mobile, iPad, as well
as laptop, and all receive
regular updates.
Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer,
Wipro Limited

employees 24 hours a day, seven

days a week. If someone hit a bump,
the command center was quick to
resolve it. IT worked with Wipro
marketing to evangelize the new
cloud services to employees in a big
way, promoting how much easier life
would be with Office 365.
Our migration to Office 365 was not
just one of the fastest by any
company in the space to date, but it
was also a completely seamless
experience across various
geographies with zero disruption to
Wipro employees, Ukil says.
Be productive anywhere
With 50 gigabytes of mailbox space in
the cloud, employees enjoy a clutterfree mailbox, which helps them stay
better organized. Employees also
have immediate access to the latest
Office program features, which are
automatically installed on their
computers.
Employees no longer need to
download emails to local PSTs,
Sanyal says. They have additional
online archival facilities with unlimited
storage that helps them auto-archive
emails that are more than two years
old. There is also a provision to
customize archival rules.
Sales teams use the Office 365 coauthoring capability to quickly pull
together proposals. One team
member may send an email to other
members with a link to a document
that is stored in the cloud. When
colleagues open the document, they
can edit it together and see each
others edits in real time.

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We are eager to move all our

documents to Microsoft OneDrive for
Business, which will make them all
available from any device, says
Sanyal. Being able to access emails
and documents from any location and
device is a major boost to

productivity.
Our sales teams and executives
particularly benefit from our move to
Office 365 because they travel so
much, adds Ukil. They have a
straightforward way to access emails
and documents from all kinds of
devices, including iPads. And our
adoption of Microsoft Office 365
ProPlus means I have the latest Office
applications available with the same
native experience on my mobile, iPad,
as well as laptop, and all receive
regular updates.
Help start conversations
Wipro has added social
communications to the mix. Were
using Yammer to help us replace the

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For More Information

For more information about
Microsoft products and services, call
the Microsoft Sales Information
Center at (800) 426-9400. In
Canada, call the Microsoft Canada
Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United
States and Canada who are deaf or
hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft
text telephone (TTY/TDD) services
at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50
United States and Canada, please
contact your local Microsoft
subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Wipro
Limited products and services, visit
the website at:
wipro.com

glut of emails with continuous,

searchable online conversations,
Sanyal says. For example, when a
development team is looking for a
specific skillset, it can post the
request on Yammer. Usually within
two hours an appropriate resource
surfaces. This accelerates the pace at
which we form teams and start
projects.

For the same price as our previous

solution, were giving 125,000
employees 10-times bigger mailboxes
and a terabyte of cloud storage, Ukil
says. Were getting way more for our
money with Office 365.
Best of all, Wipro can now speak with
conviction when it talks to customers
about deploying Office 365 which it
does every week. The work we did to
migrate 125,000 mailboxes to the
cloud in just 18 weeks was pretty
amazing, Ukil says. We can now talk
to customers with confidence about
large-scale cloud deployments.

Subject matter experts publish blogs

on Yammer each week, and the
management uses it to make
announcements. With Yammer, were
able to solve customer problems
faster and develop solutions sooner
while keeping customer data
confidential, Sanyal says.

Microsoft Office 365

The new Office provides anywhere
access to your familiar Office
applicationsplus email, calendar,
videoconferencing, and your most
current documentson almost any
device, from PCs to smartphones to
tablets.

Focus IT on what matters, speak

with conviction
By unplugging most of its email and
collaboration software servers, Wipro
has been able to redeploy staff to
other activities such as moving
workloads to Microsoft Azure and
creating revenue-producing solutions.

Software and Services

Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Exchange Online
Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus
Microsoft OneDrive for Business
Microsoft Skype for Business
Yammer
Microsoft Azure

For more information about Microsoft

Office 365, go to:
www.office365.com

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft Services

Microsoft Services Consulting

This case study is for informational purposes

only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published April 2015

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