Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Customer Solution Case Study
Small Firm Makes Big Bet on Microsoft; Saves
$3.7 Million, Boosts Productivity 1,400 Percent
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Florim USA, based in Clarksville,
Tennessee, is one of the largest and most
technologically advanced porcelain
facilities in North America. It has about
250 employees.
Business Situation
Florim USA had built an IT infrastructure
based on diverse point solutions—and
then found that the lack of
standardization complicated and drove
up costs for virtually every IT
management function.
Solution
The company made a major investment
in standardizing on Microsoft
technologies and deploying the latest
versions of those technologies
throughout its infrastructure.
Benefits
 Reduced costs by U.S.$3.7 million
 Boosted IT productivity by 1,400
percent
 Gained faster, cheaper, more accurate
business processes
“Standardizing on Microsoft was the key to our success.
We used the Microsoft tools and efficiencies to master
the challenges that the business gave us—I think better
than any of us had anticipated.”
Sajal Nath, Head of Information Technology, Florim USA
Can you reduce business risk by doing something your peers
regard as risky? Florim USA, with 250 employees, learned the
answer when it decided to rethink its IT strategy. Point solutions
from IBM, Novell, NEC, and Citrix had increased the complexity,
cost, and risk of virtually every IT function. To reverse that trend,
Florim USA used a strategy that small companies often consider
high risk and high cost: it standardized on one technology
platform and deployed major solutions on that platform to cover
its most mission-critical functions. The company chose Microsoft
technology, because of its potential to help roll back costs and
simplify IT management. The strategy worked. Florim USA
reduced IT costs by U.S.$3.7 million over four years, boosted IT
productivity by 1,400 percent, and reengineered business
processes to be faster, cheaper, and more effective. It adds up to
a lot less risk.
“The infrastructure was
various flavors of chaos.”
Charlie Seay, Systems Engineer,
Florim USA
Situation
Conventional wisdom says that small
companies should think twice, and then
think again, before aggressively adopting
technology in the way that larger
corporations do. First adopters may find
themselves with products that don’t work
as advertised—if they work at all. The lean
IT staffs of most small companies need less
technology to cope with, not more. The
costs of major technology adoptions—for
hardware, software, consultants, training,
maintenance, and support—can be far
beyond the benefits that these companies
will ever see, given their limited scale. And
so on.
It’s a good thing that Florim USA took that
conventional wisdom about as seriously as
it would a car full of circus clowns.
Just a few years ago, the technology
infrastructure at Florim USA—a maker of
residential and commercial ceramic tiles
designed by its Italian parent company,
Florim Ceramiche Spa—looked much like
the technology infrastructures at other
companies with about 250 employees. The
only consistent factor was a lack of
consistency. An IBM AS/400 hosted an
enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Email ran on Novell GroupWise. File servers
ran on various editions of the Windows
Server operating system. The phones—with
an infrastructure of their own—ran on NEC.
In the words of Charlie Seay, Systems
Engineer at Florim USA, “The infrastructure
was various flavors of chaos.”
When Florim USA first adopted what it
considered best-of-breed point solutions
for each need as it arose, the diverse
infrastructure had made sense. But it
turned out that the whole was less than the
sum of its parts. Although the technologies
did what they were supposed to do, they
didn’t do what Florim USA increasingly
wanted them to do: work well together.
Each of the company’s systems needed a
specially trained technician to support it.
That helped to drive up the size of the IT
staff to 10 and made it a challenge for Sajal
Nath, Head of Information Technology at
Florim USA, to reassign staff to cover
systems other than the ones for which they
had been trained. The risks inherent in a
diverse environment spread to all aspects
of IT management, including setting up
servers, maintaining them, and running
support systems such as the help desk.
The diverse environment made it
challenging for Florim USA to use its
systems in an interoperable fashion—for
example, to use Citrix GoToMeeting web
conferencing accounts together with the
NEC phone system or GroupWise email.
Tracking and maintaining licenses was yet
another challenge. With all this diversity,
there was one constant: costs continued to
rise.
Florim USA had followed the conventional
wisdom in building its IT infrastructure. But,
as a small company, it could no longer
afford the risks associated with that
infrastructure—or that wisdom.
“We were ready for a new IT strategy, one
that would limit our risks and maximize our
returns,” says Nath.
Solution
Nath knew that the new IT strategy that
Florim USA needed could be summed up in
one word: standardization. Instead of point
solutions of varying degrees of
compatibility, the time had come for Florim
USA to adopt a truly standard approach to
IT, one that would simplify and streamline
IT management, reduce costs, boost
“We chose to
standardize on Microsoft
technologies because,
even before we looked
at the TCO value, the
amount of time that
we’d save in IT
management was too
much to ignore.”
Charlie Seay, Systems Engineer,
Florim USA
productivity, make scalability cost-effective,
and deliver greater value to the company.
Choosing a Standard
But which technology was the one on
which to standardize? Florim USA
considered that question in 2006 when it
began planning for an SAP ERP system to
replace its older ERP system. Continuing to
host its ERP solution on an AS/400 would
require major expense and continue the
separation among the company’s operating
systems.
Nath took into account the database he
wanted to use with SAP—the then-current
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data
management software. Nath had compared
SQL Server to Oracle and found it superior
on licensing, ease of use, and total cost of
ownership (TCO). “We wanted a platform
for SAP that we could set up quickly,
inexpensively, and reliably, with the staff we
already had,” says Nath. “We adopted
Microsoft technology.” The SAP
environment is now supported by SQL
Server 2008 R2.
The more that Florim USA looked at
Microsoft technology, the more it liked it.
“We chose to standardize on Microsoft
technologies because, even before we
looked at the TCO value, the amount of
time that we’d save in IT management was
too much to ignore,” says Seay. “For
everything we needed to do—application
deployment, updates, and managing
compatibility with partners, vendors, and
customers—the best case scenario was
using Microsoft.”
Migrating Email
Florim USA had deployed an Active
Directory Domain Services domain for the
SQL Server deployment. The next year, the
company decided to make greater use of it.
The Novell GroupWise messaging system
had long been “cumbersome to maintain,”
according to Seay. “If there was anything
wrong with GroupWise, we’d have to stay
overnight to fix it.” Florim USA decided to
replace GroupWise with Microsoft
Exchange Server, initially adopting
Exchange Server 2003 and upgrading, most
recently, to Exchange Server 2010 Service
Pack 1 (SP1).
Adopting Virtualization
But Florim USA did much more than merely
adopt Exchange Server. At a time—2007—
when virtualization technology was
relatively new, the company decided to
deploy Exchange Server virtually by using
the first virtualization technology from
Microsoft: Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.
The company didn’t just decide to go
virtual. Seay was enthusiastic about the
technology. Nath was skeptical. They
decided on a challenge: Seay would create
the virtual deployment in the lab and Nath
would try to break it. The reliability or
riskiness of the virtual technology would be
decided by the result. Nath deleted drivers
and databases. He corrupted the code. And
each time, Seay used Microsoft
virtualization to restore Exchange Server as
though Nath had never touched it—and he
did so in just 30 seconds each time.
Florim USA’s evaluation didn’t stop there.
The company also created virtual labs for
VMware and Citrix, compared them to
Virtual Server, and declared Microsoft the
winner. The company adopted Microsoft
virtualization, which it has since upgraded,
most recently, to the Hyper-V technology
in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. The
current environment is 97 percent
virtualized (only SAP continues to run on
physical servers), with 40 virtual machines
running on six physical hosts, including Dell
PowerEdge 2950 servers and Dell R710
servers.
“Adopting Hyper-V was
an obvious winner. You
get it; you use it; you
love it.”
Charlie Seay, Systems Engineer,
Florim USA
“Placing an early bet on virtualization ran
counter to conventional wisdom for a small
company because it seemed to increase
our risk,” acknowledges Nath. “But our
strategy for IT adoption was based on the
idea that being early adopters would
actually decrease risk. With virtualization,
even if we made some big mistake and
crashed a server, we could bring it back up
immediately. If we had a hardware failure,
we could bring the software server back up
immediately on another physical machine.
The alternative is spending time and money
to bring a physical machine back up under
emergency circumstances. Our early
adoption of Microsoft virtualization
eliminated this risk for us—and eliminated
the risks inherent in the early adoption of
other technologies.”
Seay has a more succinct way of putting it:
“Adopting Hyper-V was an obvious winner.
You get it; you use it; you love it.”
He points to the performance of Exchange
Server (which more than doubled the speed
of server response times compared to
GroupWise) combined with the benefits of
Virtual Server (more uptime, fewer servers,
less IT management) as factors that
confirmed the decision to standardize on
Microsoft technology.
Making Multiple Uses of a Collaboration
Platform
In 2007, Florim USA turned its attention to
user support. To make that support faster
and more effective, Nath and Seay created
their own help desk, based on Windows
SharePoint Services in Windows Server. The
help desk uses email and workflow to
receive and route help requests efficiently.
It stores issue resolutions in a content
management site, where they serve as a
knowledge base to guide both technicians
and business users.
The company expanded its use of
SharePoint technology to include
document management for a changemanagement process based on the
Information Technology Infrastructure
Library, as well as for International
Standards Organization and Standard
Operating Procedures content. It upgraded
the Windows SharePoint Services
deployment to (most recently) Microsoft
SharePoint Server 2010, and it used the
technology in other applications—such as
department portals.
It is working on a portal that will draw realtime SAP data from SQL Server into a
Microsoft business intelligence portal to
deliver real-time production and sales data
never before available. It also will use
SharePoint Server and the Microsoft
InfoPath information gathering program to
power a change-management system.
Modernizing the Licensing Model
To make its expanded use of technology as
inexpensive as it is effective, Florim USA
shifted from an open-license model to one
based on Microsoft Enterprise Client Access
Licenses (ECALs), Software Assurance, and,
most recently, an Enterprise Agreement.
The Microsoft licensing programs give the
company access to a range of enterprise
capabilities, such as Microsoft System
Center management tools, Forefront
endpoint protection, email archiving,
Windows Virtual Desktop Access
technology, eLearning, and the Microsoft
Home Use Program.
The company updates its infrastructure to
new versions of Microsoft licensed
technologies whenever they become
available, without incurring additional fees.
It also scales up its infrastructure on
demand to cover more users and more
computing more cost-effectively.
“We’re a small company
but we like to think—
and act—like a big one.
That’s how you get to be
a big one.”
Sajal Nath, Head of Information
Technology, Florim USA
Bringing the Desktop Up-to-Date
The adoption of Microsoft technologies at
Florim USA continues, at a pace and to an
extent seldom matched by companies of its
size. The company upgraded to the
Windows 7 Professional operating system
and the Microsoft Office 2010 business
productivity suite in 2010. Nath and Seay
used Windows Deployment Services to
push out a single custom image to 120
computers in three days, incurring no flaws
and no interruption to employees.
Expanding Communications
In 2011, the company chose Microsoft
technologies to update and expand its
communications services. It used Microsoft
Lync Server 2010 to introduce presence and
instant messaging, and unified messaging
for a single email/voicemail inbox. It also
used Lync Server to replace the limited,
expensive GoToMeeting system with a
broader and more cost-effective web,
audio, and videoconferencing system. To
replace the NEC phone system, which Seay
says was expensive and proprietary. Florim
USA will deploy Lync Server for voice over
IP.
Contemplating the Cloud
Florim USA also plans to implement both
private and public cloud solutions using
Microsoft technologies. A private cloud
implementation will offer storage, servers,
and application software to the company’s
remote affiliates anywhere in the world. A
public cloud—Florim USA anticipates
adoption of the Windows Azure platform
for cloud computing—will support an
additional tier of disaster recovery. It will
also contribute to a hybrid cloud/selfhosted deployment of Microsoft Office
technologies, including the cloud-based
Microsoft Office 365.
“We’re a small company but we like to
think—and act—like a big one,” says Nath.
“That’s how you get to be a big one.”
Benefits
Florim USA wanted a technology
environment that would, in Nath’s words,
“reduce the risks and maximize the returns”
to the company. By standardizing on
Microsoft technologies, the company has
achieved massive cost savings, productivity
growth, and more effective business
processes.
Reduced Costs by $3.7 Million
Florim USA has saved U.S.$3.7 million over
the past four years, thanks to its strategic
adoption of Microsoft technology as its
standard, compared to the estimated costs
of continuing to expand its previous
infrastructure. The savings come from a
variety of sources, including: hardware
savings, licensing savings, reduced staffing,
and reduced vendor expenses.
The hardware savings have come from a
switch to less expensive hardware, server
consolidation, and a reduced need for
equipment. For example, for the initial
migration of the old ERP system on AS/400
to SAP ERP on Windows Server, expanding
the AS/400 environment to accommodate
development, test and quality, and
production environments would have cost
about $750,000. Instead, Florim USA
adopted a three-node cluster of Dell 2950
servers, for a total hardware cost of
$200,000. In addition, Florim USA avoided
the $170,000 cost that Seay estimates it
would have required in consulting and
other third-party fees to set up an IBM
iSeries and Oracle environment; it deployed
the Dell servers with internal staff only. The
total savings on this deployment was about
$720,000.
“We couldn’t afford to
do what we’re doing
with anything but
Microsoft.”
Charlie Seay, Systems Engineer,
Florim USA
Florim USA has gained another major,
continuing cost savings in personnel. As a
result of adopting technology that, as Seay
says, “practically runs itself,” the company
has reduced its IT staff by 80 percent,
redeploying workers to other tasks. The
annual savings in operating expenses is
$640,000.
Nath credits Microsoft licensing for a
simple, flexible licensing structure that
makes it easy for the company to stay in
compliance and to expand coverage to
more workers and more applications as
needed. Florim USA also gains affordable
tools that eliminate the need to retain or
adopt third-party solutions. For example, a
third-party set of management tools would
cost Florim USA about $150,000—without
necessarily providing the same value. The
company also avoided a $30,000
investment in migration tools when it
moved from GroupWise to Exchange
Server.
The greater reliability and uptime that
Florim USA has gained from adopting the
Microsoft environment decreases costs for
the company in other ways, too. Seay
estimates that mail server failures cost the
company $10,000 each. By adopting
Exchange Server and hosting it on servers
virtualized with Hyper-V, Florim USA avoids
those costs, which used to total $20,000 to
$30,000 per year.
The company has gained further savings
from its adoption of Lync Server. Florim
USA formerly spent $15,000 annually for 15
user accounts that were limited to web
sharing. Now, the company saves that cost
and much more by using Lync Server, which
provides both web and videoconferencing
and which can support far more than the
30 to 40 people that Florim USA now
includes in its larger conferences.
The savings have also increased with the
company’s newest use of Lync Server for
voice communications. Seay estimates that
if the company had expanded its existing
phone system, it would have spent $15,000
on hardware and software, plus another
$10,000 in consultants’ fees. In contrast,
Florim USA spent only $11,600 on handsets
to deploy Lync Server for voice. Microsoft
will provide an architecture design session
at a Microsoft Technology Center without
charge, which eliminates the consultant
fees. Also, Florim USA uses training
vouchers included in its Software Assurance
package to train IT personnel at
participating Microsoft training centers at
no charge. Total savings for the voice
deployment are $13,400—46 percent lower
than the cost of expanding the NEC system.
“We couldn’t afford to do what we’re doing
with anything but Microsoft,” says Seay
simply.
Boosted IT Productivity by 1,400 Percent
With the IT staff reduced by 80 percent, it
looks like the IT team at Florim had a
productivity gain of 400 percent. But looks
can be deceiving, because the productivity
story is even better than that. While it
required 10 people to manage the
environment for 250 users, the IT team
currently also serves another 350 remote
users who work for the company’s Italian
parent company and its subsidiaries. That’s
a total of about 600 users, and it means
that IT productivity has increased by 14
times (1,400 percent) compared to the
previous environment.
“We knew that we needed to provide
support for growth,” says Nath. “Expanding
all of the platforms we used to have would
have been a disaster. Standardizing on
Microsoft was the key to our success. We
used the Microsoft tools and efficiencies to
master the challenges that the business
“We’ve gone from a
reactive IT department,
always putting out fires,
to a proactive
department that can
anticipate and address
the needs of the
business. That’s what our
standardizing on
Microsoft has
accomplished.”
Sajal Nath, Head of Information
Technology, Florim USA
gave us—I think better than any of us had
anticipated.”
For example, support requests are down by
80 percent, due in part to employees
finding the Microsoft technologies more
reliable and easy to use, as well as to the
online knowledge base, which employees
use as a self-service resource. Nath and
Seay respond to users on the remaining
calls in just 10 percent of the time it used
to take, due to the fewer calls, of course,
but also due to the SharePoint help-desk
site they built, and to the fact that they
need to master just one set of
technologies—Microsoft technologies—to
support the infrastructure and their users.
Nath and Seay see efficiencies in many of
their daily tasks. Setting up a physical
server—one of the key responsibilities they
were hoping to address with the move to
Microsoft technology—used to take a
couple of hours and had to be done about
twice a week. They have reduced that fourhours-per-week total to mere minutes with
their use of Hyper-V virtualization. The time
they save is reinvested into supporting
more users and implementing more
strategic functions for Florim USA.
“We’ve gone from a reactive IT department,
always putting out fires, to a proactive
department that can anticipate and address
the needs of the business,” says Nath.
“That’s what our standardizing on Microsoft
has accomplished.”
Gained Faster, Cheaper, More Accurate
Business Processes
By standardizing on Microsoft
technologies, Florim USA has gained the
ability to use those technologies together
in ways that better serve the business—
something that eluded it with the diverse
and often incompatible technologies it
supported before.
For example, the real-time SAP reports that
executives and managers can view through
a SharePoint portal include business
process analyses. One of these analyses
indicated that the company’s manual,
vendor-based handling of electronic data
interchange (EDI) transactions between
Florim USA and its suppliers was ripe for an
overhaul. Florim USA replaced that process
with an automatic process that operates
directly from SAP. EDI transactions are now
handled faster, less expensively, and more
accurately. Now, Florim USA saves $10,000
annually in transaction exchanges with just
one customer, and it regains 31 hours per
week in staff time formerly spent on EDI
processing.
“The automated EDI process we adopted is
another example of how we’ve reduced
risk,” says Nath. “We’re not dependent on a
vendor to process our transactions, we
don’t lose employee time, we avoid
inaccuracies and the need to go back and
correct them, and we reduce expenses and
increase cash flow. Standardizing on
Microsoft has brought us gains like this
throughout the company.”
For More Information
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United States and
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Outside the 50 United States and
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information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
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For more information about the Microsoft
server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers
For more information about Florim USA
products and services, call (877) 3567461 or visit the website at:
www.florimusa.com
Software and Services

This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published November 2011
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
− Microsoft Forefront Endpoint
Protection 2010
− Microsoft Lync Server 2010
− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
− Microsoft System Center
Configuration Manager 2007 R3
− Microsoft System Center Data
Protection Manager 2010
− Microsoft System Center Operations
Manager
− Microsoft System Center Virtual
Machine Manager
 Microsoft Office 2010
 Windows 7 Professional
 Technologies
− Active Directory Domain Services
− Hyper-V
Hardware
Dell PowerEdge 2950
Dell R710
 EMC Clarion CX-4

