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.
Click for the full article from Informationweek.
Google Atmophere Conference Session 7 Notes
Google held a conference called Atmosphere on Oct.22 in London. They invited several CIOs to talk about Google Apps and Cloud services on the Panel of “Collaboration in the Workplace”. The CIOs participated in this session 7 included:
Paul Cheesbrough – CIO, Telegraph Media Group
Francois Blanc – CIO, Valeo
Todd Pierce – SVP & CIO, Genentech
Andy Beale – CIO, Guardian Media Group
Key Take-aways:
- Real benefits of collaboration; research findings from The Telegraph Media Group
- Consumerization: user expectations and skills are set in the consumer realm
- Adoption: highly intuitive with progressively declining learning curve
- Mobility: enhances collaboration and accelerates time-to-market
- Innovation: users finding unanticipated ways to deliver business value
Here are some notes that we took from this discussion:
Presentation by Telegraph Media Group:
TMG began its transition to Google Apps in July 2008 and completed the migration in July this year. A survey of workers in October this year found that in their first six months of using Gmail about 45 per cent of staff rated it as worse or the same as using Microsoft Outlook as their mail client.
TMG introduced Google Apps with a set of measures to help their employee for sake of a smooth migration, including initial training, deploying migration tool from outlook to Gmail, Open workshops, personal support, etc.
After six months of using the new system, the survey found that 82 per cent of employees rated using Gmail as superior to using Outlook, and 65 per cent of employees feel they are able to work more effectively than they could before the shift to Google Apps.
The survay conducted by a third-party agency also showed that:
From the email and messaging aspect, it showed 0.95 greater efficiency in the first six months adoption, which grew to 1.6 times greater after six months.
From the communication aspect, with the better integration of Google Apps suite, staff started to talk collaboratively, they spent 36% more time to communicate, most of those were recognized to be productive communication.
The Genentech case:
1) Genentech introduced Google Apps without promotion, while it turned out to be huge adoption among the employee. Moving to Google allows users to organize around their works rather than their tools. It helps a lot for employee to share documents within the company and with partners. It lets people to have more control over their information and over their work, to avoid over-communication.
2) Google Calendar with customized mobile application — Finding Your Room (Google API compliant Customized Application) helps to better organize and manage of the hundreds of meeting rooms and spaces.
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日本語抜粋：
イギリスのTeleｇraph Media Group(TMG)より：
TMGは、2008年7月から今年6月まで約一年間かけてGoogle Appsに移行しました。今年10月に行われた従業員向けの調査によると、約45％の従業員はGmailはMicrosoftのOutlookと又はメールクライアントと同じように利用不便とコメントしました。
TMGは、Google Appsを導入する際に従業員がスムーズに移行できるようなソリューションセットを紹介しました。初期トレーニング、OutlookからGmailへの移行ツール、オープンワークショップ、ユーザサポートなどが含まれていました。
Gmail導入の半年後、同じ調査によると、
約82％の従業員はGmailがOutlookより使いやすい、約65％の従業員は自分の効率性はGmail導入前と比べて上がったとコメントしました。
メールとメッセージングからみると、効率性は、導入より6ヶ月内には以前の0.95倍となりましたが、6ヶ月以降は1.6倍上がりました。
コミュニケーションからみると、Google Appsの良くできているインテグレーションによって、スタッフ間の話し合いが始まって、コミュニケーション時間は以前より36％長くなり、ほとんどは効率的なコミュニケーションだと思われます。
Genentechの場合：
①Genentechは販売促進なしでGoogle Appsを導入しましたが、それは従業員の中で巨大な影響があると判明しました。Googleに移行することによって、従業員はツールより自分の仕事に専念できるようになりました。会社内部及びパートナーとのドキュメント共有はもっと簡単にできるようになって、過剰コミュニケーションを避けるために、従業員が自分の情報及び仕事を制御させるようになりました。
②Googleカレンダーとモバイルアプリケーション（部屋を探せ！Google APIによってカスタマイズされたアプリケーション）は、数百のミーティングルーム及びスペースの管理をもっと簡単にできるようにしました。
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The Q&A part:
Q: What is the biggest resistance when moving to Google Apps?
A: The biggest resistance came from the IT department, the IT department has to deal with a lot of transition, partically for the network security issues, then people start to recognize the function benefits.
In Telegraph’s case, the biggest problem is conflicts between the new collaboration pace and the business pace, they are motivated to change their business pace step by step.
Q: How are you addressing collaborations crossing enterprise boundaries as compared to within the enterprise boundary?
A: The cloud really is a good fit for providing flexibility to cooperate with partners or competitors. You do have to rely upon employee to use information responsibly, that’s always the case. The good news is the speed efficiency. You can give the right information to the right collaborator without delay.
Q: Have you abandoned the extra security layer, or do you just rely on the normal approach that we are taking on consumer space , or you added additional security protection on top of what Google does natively?
A: Guardian and Genentech have kept as is their advanced authentication, such as two -factor authentication. Genentech is still only allowing authenticated equipment to access Google Apps and keeping them in house.
Telegraph has abandoned the extra layer with cautious decision.
Update:
Google’s offering within the Gmail suite now includes voice and video services that a typical corporation will find nearly impossible to provide at the Google price. Voice and video features enhance the capabilities of e-mail and instant messaging for Communication and further enable Cooperation within the corporation and beyond.
At the recent Google Atmosphere conference at a Communication and Collaboration panel made up of CIOs of companies having deployed Google Apps the Genetech CIO emphasized that collaboration features of Google Apps allowed them to increase the productivity of their typical user. Users and their partners can for example work together at the same time on the same document regardless of whether they are inside or outside the firewall.
Update:
Silicon.com has a article about Telegraph Media Group’s transition to Google Apps in details. They also mentioned that Telegraph Media Group is hosting their CRM system on salesforce.com and utilizing Amazon EC2 to support their Business Intelligence and analytics work.
Check out this article at businessweek.com
Unicharm and ISR Success Story
International Systems Research (ISR) was one of the first 10 Google Apps for Enterprise partners worldwide. ISR’s CloudGate SSO service currently delivers secure single sign-on software and services with advanced capabilities including two-factor authentication and security policy management to thousands of end users.
Unicharm Corporation, established in 1961, has its head office in Tokyo, Japan and is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of household consumer products. The company has almost 7,000 employees worldwide, and annual sales of 3.9 billion dollars. Unicharm’s products include baby and child care products, feminine care products, health care products, cosmetic products, household products, industrial materials, food-packaging materials and more.
Challenge
With the rapid growth of its global business, Unicharm was looking to unify various inconsistent company systems, reduce the cost of system expansion and reduce the workload related to e-mail management. For this purpose, Unicharm entrusted ISR to provide a solution to deploy Google Apps for 3,500 users.
Solution
First, ISR helped Unicharm determine the specifications for a highly secure system that could be easily managed and that would meet their requirements. These requirements included account management, security policy, and address book for the entire system. It was decided to,
- Unify the domain and mail system for the entire company.
- Implement a shared Address book.
- Restrict external access for increased security.
- Establish a security policy that determines password strength and password expiration for users.
- Generate a log to record who accesses the system, when, and where.
Based on these requirements, ISR provided a solution comprising Google Apps Premier Edition, CloudGate SSO and CloudGate Address Book.
ISR set up Google Apps Premier Edition accounts for Unicharm’s users and deployed the CloudGate single sign-on system with customized functions. A special version of the CloudGate Address Book was developed to fulfill the shared address book requirement with LDAP integration so that employee address book information would be updated automatically and seamlessly.
Results
Thanks to the ISR solution, today more than 3,500 Unicharm users can access all of their web applications securely and reliably. Administration costs are significantly lower, and expansion of the system for new business units can now be made easily and effortlessly.
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LotusWorks makes the move to Google Apps
Irish-owned international provider of engineering to the manufacturing and energy sector LotusWorks has deployed Google Apps Premier Edition across its workforce.
The company decided to switch almost 100 users to the web-based communication and collaboration suite to enhance the reliability of its email system for its operations in Ireland and the US.
“Our legacy system was supported here in Ireland,” explained Gary Gilgan, IT manager, LotusWorks. “We decided to look at an alternative after we experienced a serious outage incident in Ireland which affected our business operations in the US.
“Our email system failed late one evening just as our business colleagues in the US were starting their day at work. Because it was ‘out of hours’ here in Ireland we couldn’t get the necessary IT support and a day’s work was lost in our US operations.”
For more information, check out this news at: www.siliconrepublic.com
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