Today’s blog post is a customer story written by Marco Orellana, CIO of Codelco You can view other customer stories from our blog here. Do you have a story to share? Let us know and we may feature your story on our blog. 

Codelco is a Chilean State owned copper mining company formed in 1976 with headquarters in Santiago. It is the largest copper producing company in the world with more than 18,000 workers and pre-tax profits of over $4 billion in 2009.

Codelco has a strong focus on innovation, technological excellence and knowledge management as basic requirements for competitiveness. We are constantly looking for ways to leverage technology to increase productivity and help drive business results.

I’ve been the CIO of Codelco for 7 years and believe our approach to IT is quite visionary. I’m responsible for developing new strategies for the mining business through the application of information, automation and communication technologies. This is the foundation by which we first began to consider the merits of ‘cloud computing’ and whether such a move was right for our business.

I believed we could gain greater efficiencies and reduce costs by moving some of our data to the cloud and I wanted to consider several vendors before making a decision. Although we had a long standing relationship with Microsoft, we considered other vendors based on the notion that we could save money and simplify our approach to messaging. It soon became clear that other vendors did not have the expertise to provide the security and reliability our business required. Additionally, we weren’t willing to trade functionality and interoperability with our existing line of business applications for services that offered little more than the allure of price.

A small video to serve as example

Having a world class communication and collaboration platform is important to our business. We were pleased with the efficiencies we’d gained from the on premises deployment of Exchange 2007 to 12,000 employees. When we discovered we needed a way to provide 7,000 deskless workers an e-mail solution, we opted for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and were one of the first companies in Chile to do so. We’ve since added Office Communications Sever to our portfolio and currently have 700 users who are able to communicate and collaborate seamlessly through the familiar Office experience.

Whether you operate a global business or plan to become one, having an enterprise class communication and collaboration solution can play a big role in your long term success. We’ve found that moving to the cloud with Microsoft has been a great way for us to gain efficiencies and save money without sacrificing functionality.