Last week, Michael Novinson from the Channel Company published an article on its IT Best of Breed website around Perficient’s work with Partners In Health to deliver cloud communication capabilities to workers in remote locations. The full article is available here.
From the post:
The St. Louis-based company, No. 66 on the CRN SP 500, migrated the infrastructure and 3,000 employees of Partners In Health to a Microsoft Office 365 suite at the purchasing price without any markup.
Boston-based Partners In Health trains healthcare providers and delivers clinical and social support for impoverished communities in areas such as Haiti, Rwanda and Siberia. The organization has also been involved with responding to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“It’s a great cause,” Perficient CEO Jeff Davis told Itbestofbreed.com.
Davis said Perficient – which was named Microsoft’s partner of the year in 2013 – was the only solution provider willing to do the work without any profit margin.
Novinson went on to discuss how the Gates Foundation donated the cloud services while Microsoft donated the software. The solution includes Exchange Online for email communication, Azure AD for identity management and SharePoint Online for collaboration.
Prior to Office 365, Davis said many employees were in remote locations with such little bandwidth that they had to go to internet cafes and use Gmail. Some Partners In Health employees were not on a single email system, he said messages would sometimes get lost due to time zone changes.
Since Office 365 operates out of the cloud, Davis said it does not require much data to be moved across the system, which is vital given the remote location of Partners In Health clinics, particularly in Haiti.
The SharePoint piece, though, will be much more data intensive, meaning Perficient might not be able to roll it out at every site.
Perficient also addressed Partners In Health’s server crashes and shored up issues with legacy systems since even a cloud-based application such as Office 365 requires some on-site computing power.
You can read the full piece here, or read a recently published case study describing the client’s challenges and how Perficient is addressing them.
