Microsoft Office 365
Customer Solution Case Study
Wipro moves 125,000 mailboxes to the cloud
in record time of 18 weeks
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Professional services—IT
services
Customer Profile
Wipro is a global information technology,
consulting, and business process services
company. Based in Bengaluru
(Bangalore), India, it serves customers all
over the world and has revenues of
US$7.5 billion.
Business Situation
More customers were asking Wipro to
help them migrate to software-as-aservice models, and Wipro wanted more
modern communications tools for its
own workforce.
Solution
Wipro migrated 125,000 employees to
Microsoft Office 365 while keeping
31,000 employees on on-premises email.
Benefits
 Migrate 125,000 mailboxes to the
cloud in 18 weeks
 Give employees much larger mailboxes
 Help employees be productive
anywhere
 Gain first-hand experience in moving
to the cloud at scale
“The work we did to migrate 125,000 mailboxes to the
cloud in just 18 weeks was pretty amazing. We can now
talk to customers with confidence about large-scale
cloud deployments.”
Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer, Wipro Limited
Wipro helps its customers transform their businesses using
cloud-based IT services. To provide better counsel, and to
transform its own business, Wipro deployed Microsoft Office 365
for 125,000 employees while keeping 31,000 mailboxes onpremises. With more modern communications tools and ready
access to information and to one another, Wipro employees are
more productive and can implement hybrid cloud projects with
ease and confidence.
“Our migration to Office
365 was not just one of
the fastest by any
company in the space to
date, but it was also a
completely seamless
experience across
various geographies,
with zero disruption to
Wipro employees.”
Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer,
Wipro Limited
One of the leading information technology,
consulting, and business process services
companies, Wipro supports a customer
base of Global 500 companies, many of
which are transforming their businesses
with software as a service (SaaS) solutions.
To partner with these customers, Wipro
needed experience in deploying large-scale
cloud solutions. “If we haven’t implemented
large-scale SaaS systems ourselves, it’s hard
to speak with conviction to customers,”
says Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer at
Wipro Limited.
Wipro also knew that modern cloud-based
solutions would help its own business.
Younger employees were dissatisfied with
the standard communications and
collaboration tools. They wanted tools that
were more mobile and social. And the cost
of maintaining conventional email,
collaboration, and telephony systems was
rising.
Move to the cloud at scale
To reduce the cost of core IT systems, free
its IT staff to focus on revenue-producing
solutions, and equip its global workforce
with modern productivity tools, Wipro
decided to deploy Microsoft Office 365.
This was a hybrid implementation, done
alongside its existing Microsoft Exchange
Server 2010 infrastructure. Office 365 is a
suite of cloud-based Microsoft Office
applications, email, videoconferencing, file
storage, file sharing, and social networking
tools.
The hybrid deployment involved moving
125,000 mailboxes to Office 365 and
leaving the remaining 31,000 mailboxes onpremises running on Exchange Server. The
on-premises mailboxes included shared
mailboxes, conference room and
application-specific email IDs, and
mailboxes that were in compliance with the
US government data security regulations
and customer contractual requirements.
“As a result of our upfront planning work,
we were able to migrate 2,500 mailboxes a
day—10,000 to 15,000 mailboxes a week—
to the cloud without incident,” Ukil says.
“We looked at other solutions, but our IT
staff and end users were well versed in
Microsoft products, and we didn’t want to
introduce changes that would cause
disruption,” says Arup Sanyal, Program
Manager at Wipro Limited. Wipro also liked
the security and compliance features of
Office 365. “We’re very excited about the
eDiscovery and Legal Hold capabilities we
get with Microsoft Exchange Online,”
Sanyal says. “Using them will help us
simplify compliance with regulatory
requirements.”
Wipro spent several months upfront on
migration planning and change
management, and it engaged Microsoft
Services Consulting for assistance. It then
rolled out a few services of Office 365 at a
time, beginning with email and Yammer, an
enterprise social network. The deployment
team automated everything possible and
made the switchover extremely easy for
employees. Wipro created a command
center to support employees 24 hours a
day, seven days a week. If someone hit a
bump, the command center was quick to
resolve it. IT worked with Wipro marketing
to evangelize the new cloud services to
employees in a big way, promoting how
much easier life would be with Office 365.
“Our migration to Office 365 was not just
one of the fastest by any company in the
space to date, but it was also a completely
seamless experience across various
geographies with zero disruption to Wipro
employees,” Ukil says.
“Our adoption of
Microsoft Office 365
ProPlus means I have the
latest Office applications
available with the same
native experience on my
mobile, iPad, as well as
laptop, and all receive
regular updates.”
Raja Ukil, Chief Information Officer,
Wipro Limited
Be productive anywhere
With 50 gigabytes of mailbox space in the
cloud, employees enjoy a clutter-free
mailbox, which helps them stay better
organized. Employees also have immediate
access to the latest Office program
features, which are automatically installed
on their computers.
“Employees no longer need to download
emails to local PSTs,” Sanyal says. “They
have additional online archival facilities
with unlimited storage that helps them
auto-archive emails that are more than two
years old. There is also a provision to
customize archival rules.”
Sales teams use the Office 365 coauthoring capability to quickly pull
together proposals. One team member
may send an email to other members with
a link to a document that is stored in the
cloud. When colleagues open the
document, they can edit it together and see
each other’s edits in real time.
“We are eager to move all our documents
to Microsoft OneDrive for Business, which
will make them all available from any
device,” says Sanyal. “Being able to access
emails and documents from any location
and device is a major boost to
productivity.”
“Our sales teams and executives particularly
benefit from our move to Office 365
because they travel so much,” adds Ukil.
“They have a straightforward way to access
emails and documents from all kinds of
devices, including iPads. And our adoption
of Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus means I
have the latest Office applications available
with the same native experience on my
mobile, iPad, as well as laptop, and all
receive regular updates.”
Help start conversations
Wipro has added social communications to
the mix. “We’re using Yammer to help us
replace the glut of emails with continuous,
searchable online conversations,” Sanyal
says. “For example, when a development
team is looking for a specific skillset, it can
post the request on Yammer. Usually within
two hours an appropriate resource surfaces.
This accelerates the pace at which we form
teams and start projects.”
Subject matter experts publish blogs on
Yammer each week, and the management
uses it to make announcements. “With
Yammer, we’re able to solve customer
problems faster and develop solutions
sooner while keeping customer data
confidential,” Sanyal says.
For More Information
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
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Wipro
Limited products and services, visit the
website at:
wipro.com
Microsoft Office 365
Focus IT on what matters, speak with
conviction
By unplugging most of its email and
collaboration software servers, Wipro has
been able to redeploy staff to other
activities such as moving workloads to
Microsoft Azure and creating revenueproducing solutions. “For the same price as
our previous solution, we’re giving 125,000
employees 10-times bigger mailboxes and
a terabyte of cloud storage,” Ukil says.
“We’re getting way more for our money
with Office 365.”
The new Office provides anywhere access
to your familiar Office applications—plus
email, calendar, videoconferencing, and
your most current documents—on almost
any device, from PCs to smartphones to
tablets.
For more information about Microsoft
Office 365, go to:
www.office365.com
Best of all, Wipro can now speak with
conviction when it talks to customers about
deploying Office 365 —which it does every
week. “The work we did to migrate 125,000
mailboxes to the cloud in just 18 weeks was
pretty amazing,” Ukil says. “We can now
talk to customers with confidence about
large-scale cloud deployments.”
Software and Services
Microsoft Office 365
− Microsoft Exchange Online
− Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus
− Microsoft OneDrive for Business
− Microsoft Skype for Business
− Yammer
 Microsoft Azure
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This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published April 2015
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Microsoft Services

Microsoft Services Consulting