The Solution
The partnership took form very quickly, proceeding from the first introduction to the first mailbox migration in just a few months. An agreement was signed, and Intermedia immediately got to work:
- Intermedia’s Cloud Concierge™ team of migration experts began aligning people and processes to migrate 10,000+ mailboxes across more than 500 accounts.
- Engineering began customizing the Intermedia partner portal to support the Provider’s legacy and ongoing businesses in three countries.
- Most significantly, Intermedia’s operations team sprung to build out a brand new datacenter to support the Provider’s Canadian customers. This included procuring datacenter space in British Columbia, acquiring hardware to build out the racks, and building a domain to support Exchange, Intermedia’s HostPilot® control panel, and all of Intermedia’s other services.
Supporting the Provider with a new proprietary migration method
“Perhaps the most complex element of the Provider’s requirements was their desire to reduce end-user disruption almost to a nonexistent point,” said Leibholz. “In a typical Exchange mailbox migration, the end-user has to remove their current Outlook profile and create a new one.”
“The Provider wanted to eliminate even this step for its users,” Leibholz continued. “So Intermedia developed a proprietary migration methodology to support this type of migration. This was no small feat—not only because of the scale, but also because the mailboxes had to be migrated into three different datacenters in three different countries.”
Intermedia’s new tool, specifically designed for high volumes of mailboxes and accounts, let Intermedia’s Cloud Concierge team pipe mail into different datacenters on an account-by-account basis. With this tool, the migration could be performed in one process, instead of a different process for each datacenter. This accelerated the migration considerably. And at the moment of cutover, the user needed only to close Outlook and re-open it.
Today, this tool is available for internal use not just by Intermedia, but also by strategic partners like the Provider. They can use the tool to perform their own high-volume migrations.
Maintaining strict white-labeling
Normally, Intermedia offers white-label capabilities to its partners so that the partners can shield Intermedia’s identity from their direct customers. But in this case, the Provider did not want their partners to be aware of the Intermedia relationship.
“Intermedia took their white-labeling to another level,” said the Provider’s VP. “Not only did they customize the partner portal for our needs, but they also adapted their sales collateral for our needs—both direct and channel, for our US, UK and Canadian businesses.”
“They also adapted their systems to allow us to keep some of our Exchange customers on our servers in the UK,” he added. “We loved the flexibility they showed in accommodating the nuances of our business.”