With more than 30 global and local brands, the Bel group brings smiles to nearly 400 million consumers across 120 countries every year. Bel’s cheese matches the image of its powerful brands delivering gourmet pleasures and cheer.
Initial situation
The Bel group wanted to upgrade its Lotus Notes messaging system. When searching for solutions, the CIO realised that extending the project to a general workstation upgrade would be a great idea. The aim was to enhance each workstation’s performance and features while facilitating hardware population administration.
An SAM mission with a software licensing expert enabled us to kick off a comprehensive audit aimed at collecting data on the licences being used, then to compare the licence base with the invoices corresponding to licence purchases, made either when PCs were bought, either individually, or as part of group contracts.
Based on this inventory, by reconciling the licences used with the licences purchased and checking for correct use and compliance, our Bechtle Comsoft specialist applied the publishers’ licensing rules, which, for a layman like me, look like a jungle of down- and upgrade rights, portable or fixed licences, and rules that vary with the purchase date and seniority. Based on the results of this licencing engineering audit, we were able to make sure that our software assets are being used properly.
Results
The products selected and deployed in the project (2015) were Exchange Online messaging, Lync Online unified messaging and Sharepoint Online collaborative EDM. This is why the Bel group switched to a collaborative unified communication solution in SaaS mode. The cost of the project wasn’t specified, but significant savings have been achieved in operating costs, infrastructure costs, hardware rentals and administration and maintenance costs. The solution has even been extended with the addition of the Yammer corporate network. Today the Bel group is using M365.