The Solution
The police department’s Exchange servers had been down for four weeks, and they wanted a hardware proposal from SOS Systems. Young knew that with government entities, the procurement process is slow. He also knew that Intermedia’s Exchange Email offered a quick way to get the department back online.
He began his presentation by focusing on his company’s ability to respond quickly to the department’s needs. “If you can get me a list of all the email addresses in your system,” he told them, “I can have you up and receiving email in less than four hours.”
After 28 days of downtime, the phrase “four hours” got their attention. To seal the deal, Young leveraged Intermedia’s 30-day risk-free trial and proposed they try the new cloud solution for a month at no charge, while they worked on the necessary approvals. “Let’s try Exchange Email for a month,” he told them. “If it meets all your requirements, why would you want to invest in hardware and software?”
The department agreed. And even better than advertised, Young and Intermedia got the department’s email back up and running in just two-and-a-half hours. “Onboarding was so simple that we pretty much did it ourselves,” Young stated. (And that was even before Intermedia had released its Cloud Concierge Onboarding Tool for partners.)
When Young called two weeks later to check in, he learned that there was only one problem the department had encountered in the interim: one user had forgotten their password. The idea of procuring hardware never came up again!