Enjoying economics of cloud for system centralization across business units with a drop in operation cost by 30% in 3 years and reducing reliance on hardware and maintenance
Hong Kong, 12 May, 2015 — In today’s fast-moving business world, having an up-to-date IT infrastructure with a high level of flexibility and scalability is critical to the success of any company. In order to meet the needs of modern businesses, Microsoft is dedicated to bring the most comprehensive and scalable cloud solution, comprised primarily of Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online. Businesses have become increasingly flexible with the emergence of mobility and the uptrend in cloud services adoption, driving operational efficiency and productivity. Azure in particular, has had a remarkable growth rate both internationally and locally. Globally, Microsoft has 19 Azure datacenter regions open for business to date, with 60% of Fortune 500 companies now using Azure. Hong Kong is proud to host a datacenter locally to serve both local and regional customers.
“Microsoft Dynamics AX (DAX) is a business solution for global enterprises that supports industry-specific and operational business processes, along with comprehensive functionality for financial and human resources management. Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables businesses to quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of datacenters. Emperor Group has deployed Dynamics AX on Azure, instead of hosting it on premises, which means the Group has control over the virtual machines and the network configuration, but it does not have to worry about the hardware investment and maintenance, thus optimizing great efficiency in management and costs.” said Flora Yu, Data Insights Product Marketing Manager of Microsoft Hong Kong.
Founded in 1942 in Hong Kong as a watch retailer, the Emperor Group (the Group) has since expanded into a conglomerate involved in businesses that span across several sectors from Financial Services, Property, Watch and Jewellery, Entertainment, and Hospitality, Printing & Publishing, Furniture & Furnishing and Food & Beverage. With its diversified scope of business, the Group aims to adopt reliable and cost-effective cloud solutions with timely and quality services. It first deployed Microsoft Azure in 2014 for one of its businesses, Hong Kong Daily News (HKDN), a general-interest Chinese language newspaper under the Group. Choosing Microsoft Azure for HKDN has led to significant benefits gained in timely media content delivery with mission-critical cloud capabilities at a very reasonable entry price. Reporters can now draft a story on-site, prepare the video footage in Azure, and the time needed to produce and upload a video clip can be hugely reduced by about 30%
Following this initial success, the Group has decided to implement Dynamics AX (DAX) – a new Finance system for its business units, in order to achieve better consolidation of reports and business analysis. “We initiated the One Finance module in our Hospitality and Property groups first,” said Kenneth Lam, Group Information Technology Director of Emperor Group, “And we hope to replace the legacy systems by DAX.”
“Our Group has a diverse business portfolio with many different requirements operating on a range of different bandwidths. With Microsoft Azure Cloud technology, we are able to be more adaptable to our Group’s needs. Microsoft Dynamics AX enables us to be more market-driven and flexible when developing our systems internally based on the easy-to-learn application language, helping us to respond to market changes and build different modules for business needs. It also allows us to reduce reliance and maintenance on hardware, thus lowering the operation cost in the long-term,” said Lam.
The deployment of Microsoft Azure brings several benefits to the Emperor Group. Firstly, a reduction in hardware investment means that it is no longer necessary to host hardware or spend time and resources maintaining that hardware. IT staff are able to migrate old servers to other business units or retain as backup equipment, allowing the personnel to shift their focus to other value-added projects. There will also be a reduction in operation costs for the DAX project. This significant saving, as well as the scalable entry investment, make it suitable for both medium and large-sized companies, like the Emperor Group.
After seeing the benefits of using Dynamics AX – a new Finance initiative in its Hotel business, the Group is now planning to deploy the workload in Property business as well as other business units. The Group is also in the process of deploying the One HR module and expects a full roll-out to all business units by the end of 2016. The Group is rapidly growing in both Hong Kong and Mainland China.
“Broadly speaking, the IT department has an ambitious roadmap to help the Group migrate its infrastructure to the cloud within 3 years to achieve a stronger business performance and to reap other benefits,” said Lam. “We are very serious about our partnership with Microsoft as a trusted cloud provider.”
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Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft Hong Kong was established in 1991.
