05.143.2012 - U.K. Events and Hospitality Company iLUKA Prepares to Scale Up, Saves Money With Microsoft Office 365 Cloud-Based Service

REDMOND, Wash. — May 22 , 2012 — iLUKA, a U.K.-based events and hospitality firm providing services for sponsors of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, has addressed the IT challenges of a tenfold increase in staff while saving tens of thousands of pounds by adopting Microsoft Office 365. The company has markedly decreased its software licensing expenses, reduced its IT workload by decommissioning redundant email servers, and is benefiting from the enterprise levels of security and availability that Microsoft offers.

“Our objectives were to lessen risk within the business, cut costs during the Olympic Games and meet our clients’ IT standards,” said Tim Chapman, iLUKA’s IT director. “Office 365 provides everything we expected. It’s been a significant win for our company.”

iLUKA develops and delivers coordinated strategic activations for sponsors, including the world’s largest banking, oil and pharmaceutical companies at global sporting events such as the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups. Providing hospitality services for sponsors of the Olympics requires iLUKA to increase its staff from about 116 to over 1,000, with all employees needing access to email and productivity software such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. With Office 365, iLUKA has the ability to add hundreds of users and pay for the software on a per-user, per-month basis. The company has the flexibility to add and delete employee accounts for the duration of the Olympic Games, paying for employees’ email and software only while they are employed.

Supporting the big events also creates significantly greater levels of email traffic, which would have required iLUKA to scale its email servers quickly. Office 365 took care of this issue, allowing iLUKA to decommission rather than upgrade its email servers.

In addition, the firm’s large clients expect it to have enterprise-level IT systems, with high standards of security, privacy, reliability and resilience. “Maximizing data security and minimizing risk are among our top priorities,” Chapman said.

More information on Microsoft’s customer success stories can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/customerspotlight. More information on Office 365 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office.

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