REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 6, 2013 — BNSF Railway Co.,
one of the oldest and largest freight railroad networks in North
America, has selected Microsoft Office 365 to enable over 40,000 workers
to share ideas and information via computers, kiosks and personal
devices. BNSF chose Microsoft Office 365 as part of its Railroad 2020
vision for modernizing the user productivity portfolio at BNSF. The
company looked at other offerings, but employees at BNSF preferred the
familiar Office experience and the company wanted to capitalize on what
people know and already use. Office was also chosen because of its
interoperability with critical line-of-business applications such as
SharePoint, and because of its ability to enable greater collaboration
across geographically dispersed workers. Employees had organically
started using Yammer as a communication tool, so BNSF plans to roll out
Yammer Enterprise, the leading provider of enterprise social networks,
to support this collaboration trend throughout the company.
“Whether it’s in locomotives, detectors along the side of the track,
geometry cars or our vast telecommunications infrastructure to support
the railroad, we rely on technology to operate our railroad and ensure
delivery of our customers’ freight,” said Jo-ann Olsovsky, vice
president and chief information officer, BNSF. “Due to the nature of our
business, the majority of our employees are outdoors in the field, so
supporting their mobility with access to leading productivity and
communications tools is critical to our success. By using tools such as
Office 365 and Yammer Enterprise, we will be able to connect our
employees to each other and the information they need to be successful.”
BNSF was seeking ways to improve efficiency in its delivery and
support of email, calendaring and collaboration software while
leveraging new functionality. BNSF began implementing Phase I of its
Office 365 and Exchange Online deployment in October to more than 40,000
users and expects to have Lync, email and calendaring services fully
deployed by early November. Subsequent phases will include deployment of
other services such as SharePoint Online and Yammer Enterprise.
BNSF’s strategic technology road map, Railroad 2020, calls for
modernizing the underlying technology infrastructure and improving
communications across the organization and externally. Office 365 is a
natural fit for Railroad 2020 by providing BNSF employees with the
familiar Microsoft Office experience. Office 365 is an always up-to-date
cloud service that supports today’s bring-your-own-device initiatives
and offers mobile employees the flexibility they need.
Employees are already benefiting from the new communication and
collaboration platform. The cloud allows employees to store folders and
files for easy access from virtually any device, and the integrated
communications capabilities provides employees with voice mail and
message transcripts directly from their inboxes, enabling faster
response times from the office or the field. Employees who are not
issued PCs, such as train crews and field maintenance workers, are able
to access email and storage offerings from shared computers or their own
personal devices.
“As a railroad, we have so many systems that we have to write from
scratch because you can’t always buy an off-the-shelf system to move to
trains; we typically have to write rail-unique systems,” Olsovsky said.
“I’d much rather our team focus on support and development of those
mission-critical operational systems rather than on our messaging
platform. If we have an expert — like we do in Microsoft — that can
ensure highly available messaging and collaboration tools, it just makes
it all the better and enables my team to focus on the operational
systems.”
More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in
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their full potential.
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