Microsoft Yammer Accelerates Momentum in Hong Kong

Esquel Group has rolled out Yammer and Office 365
Esquel Group has rolled out Yammer and Office 365 to create a highly collaborative and productive business operation across regions and generate a significant saving per annum

Hong Kong, January 9, 2014 – Microsoft Hong Kong today announced that Esquel Group has rolled out Yammer to over 4,000 employees across the region, enabling them to better engage, collaborate and innovate within the Group with improved enterprise social capabilities. This is one of the largest Yammer deployments in Hong Kong.

Today’s business world moves at an accelerated pace and organizations need to transform the way they do business not only to keep up, but to gain a competitive advantage. Enterprise social technologies are key to this transformation. Drawing results from numerous surveys, companies with socially engaged employees see 18% higher productivity and 51% lower staff turnover [1]; 66% of CIOs from top-performing organizations see collaboration as a key to innovation and 68% of users agree that Yammer improves collaboration across remote locations [2]; 70% of successful company transformations involve ongoing communication and involvement of employees [3].

“A social workplace enables businesses to transform from the inside out through engagement, collaboration and innovation,” said David Hooper, Office Division Director of Microsoft Hong Kong. “Nowadays, Yammer is recognized as the best-in-class enterprise social network and is used by 85% of Fortune 500 companies. We are very pleased that Esquel Group has chosen Office 365 and Yammer to help improve their business around the world.”

Yammer helps Esquel Group better engage, collaborate and innovate
Esquel is one of the world’s leading producers of premium cotton shirts and supplied over 100 million shirts annually to leading brands including Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike. To date, Esquel Group has production facilities in five locations throughout Asia and operates in nine countries. As a technology-focused company, Esquel Group has adopted state-of-the-art technologies to stay ahead of its competitors.

“With growing operations around the world, it has always been the company’s desire to create even greater value across the Group through modern social and productivity tools, which can enhance team collaboration, increase productivity, attract young talent and facilitate knowledge sharing and innovation,” said Wilkie Wong, Chief Financial Officer (Hong Kong & Overseas) for Esquel. “With a belief in ‘sharing more and doing more’, we deployed Microsoft Office 365 with Yammer, which enables us to enjoy the benefits of increased collaboration and productivity, increased mobility, reduced hardware and IT admin costs, and a unified culture. Together, these advantages bring us a significant saving per annum.”

“Yammer has been exceptional in addressing our communication needs, growing quickly from 100 to 4,000 users just within the pilot period,” said Andrew Ling, Group Director, Information Technology of Esquel Group. “We chose Yammer because it is a well-proven enterprise-grade social network, with over 200,000 organizations currently using it.”

“Yammer offers rich team collaboration functionality which can drive productivity and innovation anytime, anywhere, and on any device. It also demonstrates its great value in terms of staff engagement for resolving problems, team collaboration for project management and innovation for new product ideas. With Yammer, our employees can now instantly provide us with constructive feedback and new concepts, helping us break barriers across cultures, geographies and hierarchies to accelerate innovation throughout the organization.”

Ling added, “In addition to Yammer, Esquel Group moved over 7,000 users to Microsoft’s Exchange Online in 2013 as part of the Office 365 deployment. By the end of 2014, Esquel Group will also migrate to other platforms under Office 365 including SharePoint Online for knowledge management and Lync Online for web-based conferencing.”

Microsoft Yammer Accelerates Momentum in Hong Kong
Microsoft Yammer Accelerates Momentum in Hong Kong
(right to left) David Hooper, Office Division Director, Microsoft Hong Kong, Wilkie Wong, Chief Financial Officer (Hong Kong & Overseas), Esquel Group and Andrew Ling, Group Director, Information Technology, Esquel Group
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Office 365 together with Yammer raises productivity of Esquel Group to a new level
With Office 365 along with Yammer, Esquel transforms its business from the inside out and enjoys a new level of productivity in four key areas:

  • Reducing productivity loss by enhancing real-time communications to increase decision making agility, standardizing desktop productivity software, leveraging on Power BI for deeper data insights and increasing system availability by moving to Microsoft Enterprise Cloud with 99.9% availability;
  • Increasing mobility with the Yammer mobile application for employees to engage and collaborate across different mobile devices and platforms, in addition to the great Office Web Apps and online cloud system employees may use for easy file access and document editing – anywhere, anytime;
  • Reducing hardware and IT administration costs by eliminating the need to maintain 28 email servers and 14 Windows and SP servers, so as to reallocate IT support resources to focus more on business alignment, and by increasing flexibility in software investment with the pay-as-you-go model;
  • Developing a unified culture by promoting staff collaboration using next-generation social technologies and facilitating knowledge sharing and retention, thus attracting and retaining talent who love new technologies.

Yammer and Office 365 demonstrates strong growth and momentum
Yammer, along with Office 365, brings together best-in-class social productivity tools, allowing companies to engage, collaborate, and innovate in new ways to win and succeed in the marketplace. Additionally, Yammer is easy to use, easy to implement, and easy to integrate with existing business applications, simplifying the social transformation in an organization. Since the acquisition of Yammer by Microsoft in June 2012, the number of users has grown to approximately 7 million on a global scale and its full year sales in 2012 nearly tripled year-over-year. More new customers are creating social workplaces, including British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline and T.G.I. Friday’s, while local customers based in Hong Kong include Esquel Group, Mandarin Oriental and Crown Worldwide Group.

Office 365 is Microsoft’s fastest growing commercial product ever, and it is a business that generates US$1.5 billion in annual revenue, with 25% of Microsoft enterprise customers having deployed Office 365. The Office 365 adoption rate is increasing in triple digits year-on-year around the world, with the Hong Kong user base demonstrating a similar growth rate.

[1] Gallup Consulting “Employee Engagement, What’s your Engagement Ratio?” 2008

[2] Forrester Forrsights, 2011 & MarketTools, Yammer Business Value Survey

[3] McKinsey Global Survey, What Successful Transformations Share, 2010

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

 

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