Fujitsu launches new service

By Camille Bethel, Trinidad Express, Wednesday, May 7th 2008

Fujitsu is giving local organisations the opportunity to focus on running their business while they handle their email services.

The company launched its hosted email service last week at the Port-of-Spain Hilton where Racquel Goddard, Fujitsu's vice president of Managed and Outsourced Services for the Caribbean explained how the hosted email service can help make a difference in almost any organisation.

"Companies can save time by having faxes and emails come to one mailbox. One single phone number can be used to find anybody. So it is not about what is your number and how many numbers you have, but being able to find you with a single number."

This enhances customer interaction because using tools like email hosted services can improve customer service, she said.

"And those are the kinds of things that are going to separate you from your competition."

Email, she said, is a commodity service and not something that organisations need to be challenged with. It is something that if they don't get right, it can put them at a very strategic disadvantage.

"So you need to make sure that it is up, available everyone and that you are managing it properly."

However, she added, it is not something that they need to manage for themselves.

She said the service offers an opportunity for organisations to really look at bringing things together and creating some strategic advantage.

She asked the question, "What are the kinds of things that you are doing as an organisation that are making you a better organisation?"

Goddard explained that through the Fujitsu hosted email service, which is essentially managed exchange, a business service that provides anti-virus, anti-spam, back-ups and flexible access options including support for mobile devices, organisations can raise the level of the game that all other companies must step up to meet.

She said they need to ask what is the value of their IT? Are they getting value from it? Do they have the proper infrastructure for what they are going to do?

Fujitsu provides a return on investment calculation when looking at whether an organisation is a suitable candidate for a hosted email solution and most of their customers are surprised when they realise how much they are actually spending on email, she said. "We say this is what you are spending now for emails.

"For licenses, head count costs, the back up costs as well as to maintain and we take all of those costs and bundle them up and compare it to a head count cost for moving to a hosted service."

"When you look at that you can very plainly see: Does this make good business sense, because it is not going to make a difference whether we manage it or we hand it over to someone else."

She noted that email is quite pervasive and with anything that is pervasive there are going to be drawbacks.

"Emails can be a waste of time, difficult to manage. Content can be lost in emails, so managing email as an organisation what you need to be focused on is how the organisation uses emails. When you think about email and how your organisation uses it, you need to think about how it makes your organisation function."

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