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Hong Kong-based business conglomerate Emperor Group favored Microsoft Office 365 over Google Apps in its cloud computing journey that began with office automation.

As part of the Group's three-year corporate strategy formed in 2011, the 50-strong IT organization was challenged to build a global brand for the Group and a common IT platform to support business growth. The IT shop then sought for ways to migrate the Group's email and file storage to the cloud.

"Also, to keep up with the rapid growth of our businesses and cater to increasing demands from users for communication access anytime, anywhere, we were seeking a compelling cloud solution that can integrate well with our existing IT infrastructure so that we can migrate to cloud on our own terms," said Gary Choi (pictured), group CIO, Emperor Group.

With 7,000 employees, Emperor Group operates a diverse portfolio of eight businesses across Greater China including watch and jewelry retail, financial services, property development, and entertainment and film-making. These businesses, which run on different Web domains including DotCN and DotHK, became an issue for IT when it came to email consolidation and migration to the cloud.

It was September 2011 when Emperor Group's IT department evaluated both Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. With the support of technology consultant Wai On Services, the Group tested both cloud services based on functionality, connectivity and file transmission speeds.

"Google Apps [as a product] is quite good, but it has limitations. It does not support the China domain name [domains ending with .cn], which hosts a lot of our users. Also, Google has availability issues in Mainland China causing unstable Web performance," said Choi.

"You may also be aware of its [Google's] political problems in Mainland China. We didn't want to take risks, and we placed our bet on Microsoft," Choi said.

After testing the two cloud services for one-month, Emperor Group opted to deploy Office 365 because it supported multiple domains [names] and hybrid mode, including Windows Office and Linux.

"Office 365's cloud-based email system is compatible with Emperor Group's in house email systems, said Choi. Our technical staff and users needed no special training to work on Office 365 because it provides a familiar user experience comparing with Office 2007," said Choi. "Office 365 also provides stable performance. If you send a file of 10 to 20Mb in Mainland China, chances are that the connection breaks down frequently. Our own IT infrastructure may not be able to support that [large file transfer] but Office 365 has solved that connectivity problem in Mainland China," he added.

Selecting the business arm Emperor Watch & Jewelry as a cloud pilot, Emperor Group started to deploy Office 365 at the end of September 2011 and within a month it was up and running. The Watch & Jewelry business arm has more than 1,200 staff split between its Hong Kong headquarters and its mainland China retail operations. In this cloud pilot, only 300 back end staff stationing in Mainland China were migrated to Office 365.

According to Choi, all of Emperor Group's eight business arms will eventually migrate their email systems to the cloud. If other business units such as Property demonstrate the urgency to migrate to Office 365, the IT team will prioritize their migration accordingly.

Choi commented: "Within just a few months of deployment, we are already seeing tremendous benefits, one of which is reduced upfront IT costs. Office 365 is easy to deploy with minimum training required and it takes only one-third of the normal implementation time. With its faster deployment and comprehensive migration and management tools, it is estimated to save our IT resources half a man-year that can now be spent on other critical business priorities. We can see a 30% reduction in upfront IT costs by moving to Office 365."