TELUS doubles growth in hosted services with Citrix CloudPortal Services Manager

TELUS Customer Solutions is using Citrix® CloudPortal™ Services Manager to support hosted Microsoft® Exchange, Microsoft® SharePoint®, Microsoft® Office Communications Server and BlackBerry® Enterprise Server.

“CloudPortal Services Manager is supporting TELUS’ strategy of differentiating itself in the market by giving customers the tools to combine new products with existing ones,” said Renaldo Scalabrino, marketing director, TELUS Customer Solutions.

“We offer our customers the ability to add hosted Exchange to business Internet or BlackBerry services, for example,” he explained. “With CloudPortal Services Manager self-service, TELUS customers can add or remove users and select the services and service levels they want for each of their employees. These changes are automatically reflected in their monthly bill. Customers can try things on a smaller scale because it is so easy for them to self-provision. BlackBerry add-ons to e-mail are one example: people are adding the BlackBerry service to their existing e-mail account. It’s a very good growth path.”

When TELUS launched a competitive bid for a new cloud control panel, it had two essential criteria: performance with Microsoft products and speed of response to new Microsoft releases.

“Our speed to market relies on how quickly our control panel can respond to new products,” Scalabrino said. “CloudPortal Services Manager typically supports new Microsoft releases significantly faster than our previous control panel vendor. In terms of performance with Microsoft products, the quality and performance of CloudPortal Services Manager are exceptional. It remains responsive and performs well even with a large number of customers. The solution’s other big advantage is its ‘look’ – the way it appears to customers.”

He continued, “Our sales team looks forward to demonstrating CloudPortal Services Manager, customers like it and support calls related to use or performance have disappeared.”  TELUS product managers get accurate, up-to-the-minute reporting from CloudPortal Services Manager.

“We are making better-informed decisions about the management of the products, and can easily measure the effect of promotions,” Scalabrino said. “We are only using around 50 percent of what CloudPortal Services Manager can do – we are interested in exploring the product further. It can provision and manage other services such as customer relationship management, virtualization and web hosting. Delivering services through a single set of user interfaces reduces cost and time to market, and customers are comfortable using a familiar interface.”

He concluded, “It always feels as if Citrix is working with us to be successful. We find that employees at all levels of the Citrix organization go out of their way to assist and be helpful. They try to understand our business – and they exceed our expectations. We go to market as a team.”