Microsoft Office 2010 Forms Cornerstone of $2 Million IT Services Business

With a company name that sounds more like a purebred, high-performance sports car than an IT services business, eMazzanti Technologies is all about delivering powerful solutions in the most efficient manner possible. The Hoboken, New Jersey, firm is located in one of the most densely populated – and competitive – regions in the United States. Incredibly, the company’s start-up period coincided with the economic downturn that surrounded the events of 9/11. Now the company has $2 million in annual revenues and is on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in America. The foundation of this Microsoft Gold Certified Partner’s success is Microsoft Office 2010. More than a revenue generator, Microsoft Office forms the cornerstone of customer-driven IT solutions that drive additional sales and services.

Situation

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, businesses in the New York City area were faced with a down economy and many were struggling to survive. While investing in technologies was a means to drive new efficiencies and improve productivity, any such investments absolutely had to deliver tangible results. In the business climate that prevailed at the time, a single misstep could jeopardize a company’s existence.

“Volume licensing of Microsoft Office 2010 builds our long-term revenues. We’re growing by 20 percent a year.”

Carl Mazzanti,
CEO, eMazzanti Technologies.

One company that was acutely aware of this was eMazzanti Technologies, an IT services business that itself was founded just weeks before the events of 9/11. The fledgling firm had to be incredibly efficient with its own operations, and realized that it would need to transfer those efficiencies to its prospective customers in order to ensure that everyone stayed in business.

Solution

The company adopted a “best of breed” strategy built around key technology partners, in areas such as network troubleshooting, business continuity and disaster recovery, business information optimization, mobile workforce technology, information security and green computing. By using the selected products in-house, eMazzanti developed the expertise to sell, service and advise its customers, maintain their IT systems and train their employees in a highly efficient manner.

Currently the company has over 400 active customers, representing approximately 10,000 desktops. They include small- and medium-size businesses in the New York Metropolitan Area. Most are local, but some have national and international sales operations. Others are business units of large, multinational firms.

From the very beginning, the centerpiece of the firm’s strategy has always been Microsoft Office. They aim to keep customers on the upgrade path, introduce them to new features that increase productivity, and ensure that customers use those capabilities with maximum effectiveness.

The introduction of Microsoft Office 2010 represents another opportunity for the eMazzanti team to introduce a new wave of productivity and enhance value for their customers.

Benefits

Ongoing Value Through Volume Licensing

“We’ve been selling volume licensing forever, and it’s all we sell,” declares CEO Carl Mazzanti. The reasons:

Simple deployment and upgrades. “It’s all about standardization and speed of deployment,” explains Mazzanti. “We can standardize the installation for each customer, including options like spelling and grammar check. We can script it and roll it out without having a user stop by each desk. And when a new computer arrives, we simply push out the package.”

Building stronger, more profitable customer relationships. Long-term business relationships are fundamental to the eMazzanti strategy. Part of that is keeping costs predictable for customers, which is why the firm offers a fixed-fee, all-you-can-eat IT services model under its eCare program.

Volume licensing with Software Assurance fits right in. “Probably 80 percent of our licensing right now is with Software Assurance,” Mazzanti reveals. “By going with Software Assurance, software upgrades are budgetable for our customers. Upgrades aren’t a question of when they buy the product, but when we can schedule the install.”

“We’ve been selling volume licensing forever, and it’s all we sell… It’s all about standardization and ease of deployment.”

Carl Mazzanti,
CEO, eMazzanti Technologies.

A more valuable resource for customers.

The firm’s customer relationships are built around the tangible business value derived from IT investments. With Microsoft Office 2010, Mazzanti’s firm is delivering. As he points out, “There’s a lot you can get from Office right out of the box, or with a small amount of time from someone in our firm who sets it up the right way.

“Our focus with our customers is, you’ll get 95 percent of what you want out of the product, as long as you stay current. The product keeps evolving. Staying updated with Software Assurance adds a lot of value at relatively low cost.”

Mazzanti cites some of the results. “I have customers who are clearly doing massive volumes more in IT services business because of increased productivity. One customer bought Office 2010 from us with three-year Software Assurance. As a result, they are so far up in revenue this year they’re bonusing everyone.

“Another customer has been in business for 35 years, always with somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 customer accounts. They came to us in 2007, and today they’re fully deployed with Office 2010. They’re hovering at around 100,000 accounts, with two less staff, using features that are built right into Office 2010.”

Securing future revenue streams. “The coolest part of being in this IT services business is that the more we help our customers out, the more they have budgets to turn around and spend where they think they’ll get the biggest return,” says Mazzanti. “So they spend it with us. They tell us, ‘Whatever it takes, you go get it done, send me the bill, I’ll make sure it gets paid.’ And it’s not much longer of a conversation than that. “

That customer confidence leads not just to higher value customers, but more customers overall. As Mazzanti explains, “The short term impact is, it doesn’t take my guys as long to do the install. The long-term impact is, we get more installs. And lots of customers. We’re so fast that one customer talks to another customer, and it just expands, expands, expands. That’s how volume licensing of Microsoft Office 2010 builds our long-term revenues. We’re growing by 20 percent a year. And thanks to our efficiencies, we’re not adding 20 percent a year in staff.”

A Superior Productivity Tool

Through experience helping hundreds of businesses, Mazzanti has found that “honestly, it’s shocking how much people are killing their own productivity by not using the Office platform. It’s not worth the number of hours or days that are lost over so many years of using inferior productivity tools. We can show our customers the benefits time and time again.”

“Occasionally, someone will ask about using something other than Office. When the conversation comes up, it’s not that long of a conversation. We can show them how Microsoft Office is more efficient, we can train them and they’ll learn it faster, we can show them the increase in productivity if they stick with us and with Microsoft Office.”

Carl Mazzanti,
CEO, eMazzanti Technologies.

“Occasionally, someone will ask about using something other than Office, such as OpenOffice.org. When the conversation comes up, it’s not that long of a conversation. When you give a proposal to someone, they want a high return on investment with whatever they’re going to do with you. If someone’s going to come up to us and they want to add some productivity tools, we’re going to recommend Office because we know how to deploy it, we can standardize it, it’s easy to train on and learn, it integrates with all the other Microsoft products. OpenOffice.org doesn’t integrate into anything, and I wouldn’t know how to roll it out. I have no idea if it’s even possible to standardize stuff.

“We can show customers the increase in productivity if they stick with us and with Microsoft Office. There’s no reason to support anything else besides Office.”

Business Impact

In 2010, eMazzanti Technologies landed on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing small IT services business in America, with 2009 revenues of $2 million and 85 percent revenue growth over the three previous years. Unquestionably, Microsoft technologies and Microsoft Office in particular are essential to eMazzanti Technologies’ bottom line.

“Microsoft is such a huge percentage of our IT services business,” declares Mazzanti. “It really is. A huge percentage. For sure, 15 percent of our revenue is directly generated by selling Microsoft Office, for the licensing, Software Assurance, installation, support.”

“But once you’ve got Office, and upgraded to Windows 7 because the two are better together, then the customer needs a file server, e-mail access on their Outlook client, so there’s a pull-along of everything else. The full suite of Microsoft products is at least 60 percent of our revenue.

“The other 40 percent of revenue is from other services such as e-mail filtering, e-mail hosting, management services, hardware and other networking equipment.” And it’s hard to say how much of that might be directly attributable to Microsoft products, but as Mazzanti points out, “Let’s say a customer bought a new computer, only because they wanted to run Office 2010. I can’t calculate the impact that has.”

“The success of Microsoft is tied to the success of my IT services business, and Office 2010 is the biggest piece of that,” says Mazzanti.

It’s also a big piece of the role his firm has played in the success of 400 small and medium-size businesses around New York.

Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 gives your people powerful, timesaving tools to do their best work from more places. With new capabilities and insightful updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, Office 2010 offers the complete package— with familiar, intuitive tools. Now you can express ideas, solve problems, connect with people, and create amazing results—in the office, at home, or on the go. For more information about Microsoft Office, go to: www.office.com

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. 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 eMazzanti Technologies and it’s IT services business, call 1-201-360-4400 or request a free network assessment.