Partner Case Study: Project Leadership Associates

How a forward thinking IT services company grows its business by embracing and extending the cloud

This week we’re happy to highlight a great partner case study.  Project Leadership Associates (PLA), a technology consulting firm with headquarters in Chicago, IL, is opening up new business opportunities by expanding and improving its portfolio of cloud enablement solutions, leveraging Exoprise.

Like many Microsoft partners, PLA is seeing a big shift in its customer base, with organizations of all sizes looking to adopt more and more cloud-based apps and services, including Office 365.  This shift has huge implications for end-customers as well as IT services companies, and not just technical implications.  There has been a lot of anxiety within the Microsoft partner ecosystem as partners try to figure out how they survive as companies move to pay-as-you-go subscription and cloud-based applications.

PLA, however, sees these changes not as risks but opportunities to bring new and different value added services to its clients.  We have been working with their systems integration and managed services groups to look for ways they can help their customers adopt cloud services successfully and with the same level of service level insight and control as they have traditionally had with their on premise software.

With CloudReady Monitor, PLA is helping customers before, during, and after production roll-out of Office 365.

• Before Migration:  A key concern of many organizations moving to the cloud is whether or not their environment is set-up correctly.  Nobody wants to be halfway through a user migration, much less a full production roll-out, before they discover configuration issues with their network, single sign-on solution, or DNS that cripple cloud app access.  Armed with CloudReady Monitor, PLA integration teams can deliver “cloud readiness checks” as part of their customer engagement and work with the customer to resolve any potential problems before they impact the migration project or users.
• During Migration:  As users are brought online in the cloud, it’s important to keep an eye on application performance to confirm that the cloud app tenant is provisioned and configured correctly and the customer’s office locations all have sufficient available bandwidth for the increased external network traffic.  CloudReady’s trend analysis, crowd data comparison, and alarms, ensure that PLA and/or customer IT are alerted early and can identify root causes easily.
• After Migration:  As the migration completes and the environment moves into steady-state production, CloudReady is available to ensure that IT teams can maintain high quality service going forward.  For its managed services customers, PLA now offers CloudReady-enabled 7×24 performance monitoring of their cloud environments.  This helps PLA maintain a value added relationship with the customer going forward, while ensuring the customer is successful and happy with their cloud application environments.

If you’re attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, DC, this week you are seeing a clear message from Microsoft.  The future of IT is cloud and mobile.  Forward-looking partners like PLA are leading the charge by embracing and extending the cloud with new solutions that address the needs of IT in a cloud era.

We’re excited to be a key component of those new offerings.