New Mind Group’s Story: Why We Chose Google Apps
It started in 2007: New Mind Group, purveyors of managed services to SMBs in the greater Kalamazoo, Mich. area, began to run into severe scalability issues with traditional Microsoft Exchange installations. As businesses grew, so did their computing needs, but they didn’t have the money or facilities to grow proportionately. That’s when New Mind Group decided to help blaze a trail now being followed by the city of Los Angeles and go to Google Apps.
Like many service provider organizations, New Mind Group, founded in the early part of this millennium, started out as a small outsourced IT department to local businesses. It was only in 2007, as e-mail and other web solutions became less novelty and more necessity for even the smallest businesses, that they began focusing on providing SaaS applications, says New Mind Group Founder and President Daniel Jefferies.
Partnering with Google in 2007 was somewhat of a gamble, Jefferies says, because Google Apps didn’t yet offer things like Outlook integration of any kind. They hadn’t even formally launched their partner program. It was worth it, he says, because Google Apps solved every scalability problem their clients had, no data centers required. Moreover, the fact that all these different SaaS applications had a single login was immensely appealing to end-customers. New Mind Group also offers “login federation” so that other SaaS applications they offer, like cloud storage (in Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud) or Salesforce, will use that same username and password.
Google hasn’t let down Jefferies faith yet. Rather than wait years between full releases, Google constantly makes little tweaks and adds features on the fly: Jefferies calls this model “innovate and iterate,” and it suits him down to the ground since it means that Google, and New Mind Group by extension, is far more nimble with the products and services it can offer. In fact, Jefferies believes that the current trend towards hybrid legacy/cloud solutions shows that people are starting to accept the Google SaaS model as the correct one.
Read the full story at: mspmentor.com
Manufacturing Giant MWV Has Gone Google
MWV (formerly MeadWestvaco), a global packaging company based in Glen Allen, Virginia, has migrated its 12,000 technology-enabled employees to Google Apps. A 165-year-old company with a diverse set of commercial and consumer solutions, MWV products are ubiquitous in everyday life – Mead Five-Star notebooks, coffee cups from your local barista, canned beverage FridgePak cases you see in your grocery store, collectors edition DVD cases, and fluid dispensers for luxury perfumes and lotions – among many others.
MWV has grown extensively through acquisitions, which left it with twelve siloed email systems, including multiple instances of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes across the globe.
Mark Gulling, MWV’s CIO, explains that “The shift to Google has enhanced our ability to effectively collaborate by simplifying our email infrastructure, and delivered a richer set of communication tools. Google provides not only a rich collaboration suite, but a constant stream of innovative, market-defining products that enhance and constantly evolve our user’s working experience.” Gulling reports a number of benefits since switching to Google:
* Increased productivity. Users, from executives to individual contributors, have reported increases of over 30 minutes per day, thanks to powerful search capability and the organization features of Labels, Filters, and more.
* Online information sharing. Users have rapidly adopted Google Sites to share information and media. Approximately 200 group, product, and project collaboration sites have been created since MWV switched to Google Apps.
* Real-time communications. MWV has used Google Docs and video chat to help people stay in touch and collaborate in real time, avoiding unnecessary travel or videoconferencing costs.
* Innovation. MWV’s product sales team was able to quickly roll out a new quote management framework based on Google Forms and Google Docs with the help of Google Apps Script.
Read the full story at: Official Google Enterprise Blog
Read another report at: WebProNews
More details about LA’s moving to Google Apps
The City of Los Angeles is replacing its Novell GroupWise e-mail system with Google’s e-mail application and laying the foundation for implementing other Google Web-based applications in the future with the help of solution provider CSC.
CSC, Falls Church, Va., is providing Los Angeles with systems integration and services, including architecture, design, integration, migration, archiving, and training to help that organization’s 30,000-plus personnel move away from GroupWise and to a cloud-based Google e-mail system, said Mark Kneidinger Managing partner for CSC’s federal consulting practice.
“In doing that, we are also providing a platform for future development,” Kneidinger said. “And we are providing a collaboration environment for the future.”
The contract also calls for CSC to help Los Angeles implement new collaboration applications using the Google Apps platform, he said.
The deployment of the new Google Apps e-mail system for the approximately 34,000 e-mail accounts used by Los Angeles is expected to help the city enjoy overall cost savings of $5.5 million over the initial three-year period of the contract, Kneidinger said.
These savings primarily consist of eliminating the GroupWise license fees that the city would have had to purchase, but also includes the cost of software upgrades and savings from retiring old servers, he said.
“But the savings will be much more going forward with the deployment of apps using the Google platform,” he said.
CSC outbid a number of e-mail providers to win the Los Angeles contract, including Microsoft, Kneidinger said.
A youtube video about this case was posted by Google Recently:
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Jaguar Land Rover chose Google Apps
Jaguar Land Rover went Google Apps for its IT systems, 15000 users will shift from Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps. The agreement was announced at Google’s Atmosphere conference in London.
The Informationweek.com reported this deal and had a combined comments including the City LA case on October, titled as “Why Jaguar Land Rover Chose Google Apps“.
Jaguar Land Rover was the perfect opportunity for Google. Ford had sold the automaker to Tata Motors for $2.3 billion in 2008. As Jaguar Land Rover began to plan how it would extract its IT systems from Ford’s U.K.-based data center—including Outlook email running onMicrosoft Exchange servers–in walked Google.
“It presented a one-off opportunity to rather than just copy and clone what email looked like under the Ford ownership, to do something different and innovative with a valid financial business case,” says Jeremy Vincent, CIO at Jaguar Ford, who announced the Google Apps implementation on Oct. 22.
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