Alcero scores major Canadian government contract wins with SherWeb’s SharePoint cloud solutions

For the last 18 years, Alcero has built a thriving business in helping organizations deploy active solutions-in-a-box to improve enterprise content management. But with the rapid changes in cloud computing in recent years, Alcero found itself lacking the expertise it needed in this area. As more and more customers were asking about cloud-based solutions, Alcero realized it needed to strengthen this expertise, and fast, if it wanted to continue being the single, trusted vendor its clients expected.

To do that, it turned to long-time hosting provider SherWeb for help. This partnership not only allowed Alcero to rapidly gain the expertise it needed, it also put them in a position to sign two new major clients within a month.

Challenge

Rapidly gain expertise in cloud solutions to meet this growing demand and remain a one-stop-shop provider for customers.

Solution

SherWeb’s SharePoint Private Cloud services

Results

After teaming up with SherWeb, Alcero signed two major clients within a month.

Alcero is now able to deliver a worry-free, stable and reliable SharePoint environment using the latest cloud technologies.

Challenge

Cementing its one-stop-shop status

Alcero’s clients expect to manage only one trusted vendor relationship to solve all their business needs. Specializing in developing, implementing and deploying SharePoint solutions, Alcero’s core business is on the consulting and development side. However, when it came to cloud technologies, Alcero wanted to strengthen its expertise in this area in order to offer a complete, yet tailored solution to customers.

Turning the cloud from threat to opportunity

With everyone talking about the powerful benefits of the cloud, Alcero’s clients had increasingly higher expectations about the ROI, scalability and reliability of their SharePoint solution.

Knowing that the cloud was here to stay, Alcero decided to not only embrace the cloud but turn it into a lucrative business opportunity as well.

Meeting tough requirements

Alcero faced additional challenges, however. Some of its in-a-box solutions were not compatible with the SharePoint Online version from Microsoft. To truly benefit from Alcero’s rich-feature set, clients needed a full version of SharePoint Server, requiring hosting and management either on-premise or with a 3rd party provider.

To further complicate matters, many of Alcero’s customers are in the Canadian government and professional association sectors, where Canadian data sovereignty is critical for regulatory compliance. In other words, Alcero not only needed a hosting partner it could trust, but one with Tier 3+ datacenters in Canada.

“For the amount of trust our clients place in us, we had to be 100% confident in our choice of cloud partner,” says Danny Boulanger, President of Alcero.

Solution

After researching several potential partners, Alcero found exactly what it was looking for in SherWeb, a long-time hosting provider based in Quebec with enterprise-grade infrastructure. As a reseller in SherWeb’s partner network, Alcero was now able to confidently recommend SharePoint hosting to its customers, knowing that they would be in good hands, whether the need was for a shared or a completely dedicated instance of SharePoint.

Results

Securing new business opportunities

By leveraging SherWeb’s hosting infrastructure, Alcero was recently able to sign contracts with Quebec’s MTQ and MSSS. One client needed a long-term contract to secure pricing and the other required a more flexible and scalable contract; Alcero was able to easily meet these needs with SherWeb’s flexible and scalable plans.

“We work hard to ensure our 4,000 resellers can offer customers the best of the cloud without losing their ability to tailor solutions,” says Simon Langlois, Product Marketing Manager at SherWeb. “It’s one of the reasons why we are the single largest SPLA SharePoint hosting provider in Canada, and why Microsoft named us its Global Hosting Partner of Year in both 2013 (Winner) and 2014 (Finalist).”

Tailoring innovative solutions

The MTQ was looking for a highly stable and secure plat- form using multi-factor identification. Alcero recommended SherWeb’s managed platform as the best fit, and tacked on its own value-added professional services at the site collection level to manage permissions and workflows for the client.

The MSSS, on the other hand, wanted a more complex and innovative environment using specific features and applications developed by Alcero. By leveraging SherWeb’s unmanaged platform, it was able to provide a turnkey, Alcero-managed solution.

Now that it’s able to confidently meet the growing demand for cloud solutions and remain a one-stop-shop provider for customers, Alcero has high expectations for the future.

“We’ve been blown away by SherWeb’s professionalism when communicating with customers,” says Danny. “And the fact that its hosted solutions and tech support are fully bilingual will make closing new contracts that much easier for us.”