Valorem specializes in Microsoft cloud solutions

Valorem Consulting, with offices in Kansas City and St. Louis, Mo., is betting that many businesses that decide to move to the cloud will stick with familiar Microsoft technologies.

That's why the integrator was founded explicitly to focus on deploying Microsoft BPOS — now officially known as Office 365. Since then, it has invested heavily in developing technical resources for Microsoft Azure, SharePoint and SQL Business Intelligence. The company is a Microsoft Gold level partner in the latter competency.

For a sense of the sort of work that Valorem offers, you can consider the case of Overland Solutions, an audit company that used the solution provider to migrate to an extensive portfolio of Microsoft cloud solutions founded on the Microsoft Office 365 platform and SharePoint.

The company's original motivation for moving to the cloud was its sizeable remote workforce — up to 75 percent of the 1,000-person team is remote. And, yes, it evaluated Google first before choosing to move to Microsoft for pretty much the whole kit and kaboodle.

"Google had an attractive offering from a pricing perspective, and the Gmail messaging solution seemed to work," commented David R. Robinson, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Overland Solutions, in the written case study about the deployment. "But we thought Google had some serious limitations, such as inadequate offline access to productivity applications. For example, at that time you could not work offline on the Google Apps spreadsheets."

To be fair, this migration happened at least two years ago, and there have been significant enhancements to both the Google cloud applications suite and the Microsoft offerings since that time. That same objection probably wouldn't be offered now. But it's really not where Valorem focuses most of its attention.

In fact, when I asked the Valorem team what makes businesses say "Yes" to the cloud, it came down to the sense of democratization that cloud-served applications, particularly business intelligence, brings to companies. "This is being converted from an intensive task that only certain persons can handle to something that virtually anyone can do. You can basically pull the data and visualize it in a way that makes sense to you — it's becoming a huge enabler," said one member of the Valorem executive team.

Although it typically services companies with more than 500 employees, Valorem itself employs about 50 people. Right now, its primary verticals for cloud migrations include financial services, health care, education and insurance.