MEDIA RELEASE
Emantra Delivers Solution To Provide Single National E-mail Presence for BDO Kendalls Australia
BRISBANE, 31 July 2007 – Emantra, a next generation provider of software as a service, has announced that BDO Kendalls, one of Australia's largest associations of independently owned accounting practices, has implemented a solution to establish a single national e-mail presence. The mail connector and redirector service provided by Emantra gives BDO a single consistent naming convention and centralised address book across all nine Australian offices. It makes internal and external e-mail communication easier and more efficient for employees, business partners and customers.
BDO provides standard accounting services plus business advisory services to corporations and individuals. The organisation currently has over 1200 staff in Australia across office locations in Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Each office is independently owned but operates as part of BDO Kendalls through a partnership structure. This structure has meant that each office has its own technical infrastructure and mail server with individual office e-mail addresses.
In early 2007 a business decision was made to centralise with a single consistent e-mail presence for its customers in Australia, in line with its single national web presence. BDO went to the market to look for a solution that would establish a single national e-mail domain and single national address book. As part of the selection process, BDO developed a requirements specification and design document and distributed this to a broad range of vendors for response. Of the ten proposals received back, six proposals correctly addressed the requirements and met implementation timeframe and budget constraints. Proposals were weighted by selection criteria and submitted to each state office selection committee for feedback prior to short-listing. Emantra was ultimately chosen in March 2007.According to Chad Coulin, National Technical Services Project Manager, BDO Australia, “We chose Emantra because of their outstanding references as well as the fact that we felt they would provide a high level of personal service, which is in line with BDO’s own business philosophy of personal service. They also proposed the most elegant solution and were able to commit to the implementation timeframe and budget.”
Emantra provides a fully managed hosted redirection and connector solution delivered to a high service level agreement. A national server sits on the public network and receives and routes e-mail to all offices. BDO’s national e-mail address book also sits on the same server. Connectors link the national server to each branch office and individual office e-mail addresses have now been replaced with a single @bdo.com.au e-mail address. “Emantra has implemented a transitional solution which enables the national BDO firm to operate with the advantages of a single email domain with collaborative capabilities while still maintaining local office mail servers of differing types and versions, including Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise and Microsoft Exchange,” said Mr Coulin. “From an image perspective the solution reinforces BDO’s single national presence and has allowed us time to manage the longer term goal of migration to a single centralised mail server platform.”
“We have found the technical support provided by Emantra to be of a high level. Occasionally integration issues pop up because offices have different e-mail platforms and these are always resolved quickly thanks to Emantra’s in-depth Microsoft focus and knowledge. We also get to talk directly to technicians rather than an automated system – this type of personal service is not really the norm anymore so it’s good to know you can still get this sort of service,” concluded Mr Coulin.
Ross Dewar, Managing Director of Emantra, said “We’re thrilled to be providing a business critical solution to an organisation of the size and calibre of BDO. Emantra’s connector and redirector solutions are a terrific way for organisations with multiple offices, franchises or acquisitions to establish a single e-mail presence across the entire entity by utilising our proven infrastructure and expertise.” The cost of the solution provided to BDO Kendalls is approximately $4,000 per month on a pay per month basis.