Addressing customer challenges
Exceed’s selling motion puts customer pain points ahead of everything else, and with deep experience delivering a broad range of IT solutions and an extensive background as a Microsoft partner, it’s rare for Exceed to face a customer challenge they can’t address. The key, El Habet stressed, is to approach each engagement from the customer’s perspective, first understanding the problems they face before even beginning to talk about technology.
Exceed’s sales approach and the increase in cloud adoption in the region have recently produced some big wins for the company, including recent deployments of Microsoft cloud solutions among government agencies.
El Habet outlined the case of a government agency that had increased concerns about protecting the organization from data leaks and outside threats. “Ransomware, malware, and viruses are manifesting at alarming rates in this region,” El Habet explained, “so this agency realized they need solutions that will help protect their environment, employees, and data in real-time.”
To meet the agency’s demands, Exceed deployed a number of Microsoft security solutions, including Azure Information Protection (AIP), Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). These and other security tools in Office 365 Enterprise E5 were paired with Exceed’s Technology Adoption Program, a change-management process designed to accelerate employee adoption of new systems.
“The customer was impressed with the advancements their employees made in handling internal and external communications, and saw immediate benefit from the enhanced security related to email and documents,” El Habet said. He went on to explain that, given the effectiveness of Microsoft’s cloud security solutions and the ease with which employees adapted to using Office 365, they’ve already retained Exceed to help them build a roadmap for additional digital transformation in the cloud.
Developing apps that introduce customers to the cloud
Before businesses and government agencies will consider moving established on-premises solutions to the cloud, they must develop trust in the security of their data and in the support they’ll receive. “When you consider the cloud, it’s taking customers in this region a bit longer to get there, but I think it’s just a matter of time,” said Kara Zachariah, manager of Exceed’s Microsoft partnership.
Zachariah explained that developing their own cloud applications is one step Exceed has taken to help customers develop comfort with the cloud. They’ve even had some success introducing the application to government agencies that have previously shown a high level of reluctance to shift workloads to the cloud.
“We’ve built a strategy and performance management platform that runs on our Azure tenant, and we’ve had some success getting government customers to trial it and roll it out as an initial step into one aspect of the cloud,” she explained.
Advice for partners
When asked what advice Exceed has for Microsoft partners who face similar challenges, El Habet stressed the need to build up customers’ trust level. He explained that much of the reluctance to migrate to the cloud stems from uncertainty about control over access. “The most important thing over here is trust that data is not going to be compromised and the data is really in safe hands,” he said.
“Customers want control,” El Habet said. “They’re not just concerned about where their data resides. It’s more about a feeling of comfort that your data is yours and nobody can just have a look into whenever he wants." He went on to explain that the key is to help customers understand that they can maintain strict control over who accesses their data, and how they can use Customer Lockbox to maintain control over access even in the rare cases where a Microsoft engineer needs to access their data.