Chromebooks now available to schools & businesses in six more countries

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager for Chromebooks

Today we announced that Chromebooks are now available in six more countries around the world. Hand-in-hand with several reseller partners, we’ve worked so that you can also purchase Chromebooks for businesses and schools in these same countries.

Students from Richland School District Two in South Carolina using Chromebooks

More than 2,000 schools are now using Chromebooks for Education. Chromebooks help educators improve teaching and learning, whether it’s in one classroom like Mr. Hathorn’s History Class in Vermont or for 17,000 students in an entire school district in Richland Two, South Carolina. To start your school’s journey you can tune into one of the Hangouts On Air next week on the Google in Education Google+ Page. During these Hangouts we’ll provide more information about Chromebooks for Education and will answer audience questions.

• Australia - Event on March 28th at 10:00 EST
• Canada - Event on March 28th at 14:00 EDT
• France - Event on March 29th at 16:00 CET
• Germany - Event on March 28th at 17:00 CET
• Ireland - Event on March 26th at 17:00 GMT
• The Netherlands - Event on March 27th at 17:00 CET

Businesses around the world are also using Chromebooks where they need greater security and increased shareability. For example, Chromebooks enable employees like those on retail shop floors, manufacturing lines and out in the field, giving them access to central information and providing more timely updates on remote conditions. This is helping businesses to make better decisions faster.

We are excited to see what schools and businesses in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands do with Chromebooks. If you are interested in learning more about Chromebooks for your school or system you can visit the Chromebooks for Education website and click the “Contact Sales” button to complete the short form. Businesses cancontact our business team to learn more.

HubSpot has gone Google

Posted by Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot 

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. When we looked at several recent lists of the top startups in the Boston area - from Bostinno, Quora and the Boston Business Journal - we were pleased to discover that about 75% of these companies are running on Apps. 

Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, the industry leader in inbound marketing software and one of those top startups. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Back in 2006, two MIT alumni decided there had to be a better way to do marketing. Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan knew that loud, interruptive and unwanted advertising wasn’t the way to help businesses attract customers, not to mention that new technology like caller ID and spam filters was simultaneously rendering those legacy efforts less effective. So they started HubSpot, and with it, a new paradigm that would be better for both marketers and customers, replacing loud, interruptive advertising with marketing consumers actually love.

Hubspot has grown to 450 employees since launching in 2006, and along the way, we've settled on a core mantra when it comes to how we work: “use good judgment.” We don’t tell employees where they have to work or when they have to be here - we care most about results. It’s imperative, then, that we leverage enterprise tools that make work easy and accessible anytime and anywhere. That’s why we use Google Apps. It lets us work together whether we’re at our desks or halfway around the world. That, combined with the fact that it grows with us and is simple to use, makes it the perfect solution for our company.

Our employees use Google Apps every day on nearly every aspect of our business. With Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’re able to collaborate on our most important documents with our colleagues, no matter where we are. We can store all our files in one place with Drive, so each team knows they can find their templates and notes whether they’re sitting down with their laptops or traveling with their smartphones. And Google Forms makes tracking executive speaking requests simple and seamless. Any time an organization wants a HubSpot expert to talk at an event, we send them a form with a set of standard questions, and the information they submit about the opportunity is automatically populated into a spreadsheet that houses all other requests. It's perfectly efficient.

Google Calendar helps us stay transparent, which we consider essential to empowering our employees. Many of our executives book office hours on Google Calendar and share them with our company. Any employee at any level can sign up for an hour with them, where they can bring up anything from product development ideas to problems they’re having at work.

Working for a fast-moving company isn’t easy, but with Google Apps, we’re not burdened by the hassles that can otherwise grind busy days to a halt without a strong technology platform. We don’t have to deal with attachments, version history screwups, email outages or fussing around with our phones to get our email to sync. We open up Google Apps and it works. It’s the same experience we offer with our software – simple, effective and lovable.

Holcim builds a foundation with Google Apps

Posted by Khushnud Irani, the Chief Information Officer at Holcim

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Khushnud Irani, Chief Information Officer at Holcim, one of the world’s leading suppliers of cement and aggregates with over 78,000 employees worldwide. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Founded in Switzerland in 1912, Holcim has become one of the world's leading suppliers of cement and aggregates. The Group also supplies ready-mix concrete and asphalt, and provides related services. We have production sites in about 70 countries on every continent - we’re more spread out globally than any other building materials group.

This business and geographical diversity gives us many advantages, but it also means that cross-functional and cross-regional communication and collaboration can be challenging. To meet this challenge and to unify the many such platforms in use across the Group, Holcim’s Executive Committee decided to roll-out Google Apps worldwide to our 40,000 IT users. We chose Google Apps because it will help us concentrate on our core businesses, and bring our employees, customers and partners across the globe closer together.

The introduction of Google Apps in our company over the coming years is aligned with the goals of the Holcim Leadership Journey, an initiative to promote customer excellence, increase operational efficiency and develop talent. Collaboration and the global spread of experiences and expertise will be easier, faster, and more efficient, in real-time and from anywhere via mobile and desktop devices. Over time, we believe Google Apps will help to create stronger relationships with customers, suppliers and other business partners by directly involving them in online discussions, idea exchange and project work. Also, the innovative and interactive electronic workspaces Google Apps provides will help Holcim attract future generations of young talents to the Group.

In addition to the suite of communications and collaboration, we are going to set up three other Google Enterprise solutions: Google Search Appliance, Google App Engine, and Google Apps Vault, an add-on for Google Apps, which will help manage and archive all email data. With the introduction of Google Enterprise products, we are embracing modern cloud-based delivery models that ease the technical complexities of internal operations. Such a model takes away the technical complexities of internal operations and instead allows IT personnel to focus on closer involvement with their business counterparts in creating deeper business value.

The roll-out of Google Apps to Holcim Group companies will start in the summer of 2013. Google Apps will enable better collaboration and drive innovation around the world. We are excited to embark on this cultural change that will allow our employees to bring the tools they know and use in their personal lives into the workplace on Google Apps. 

Japan’s All Nippon Airways now en route to the digital cloud

Posted by Mr. Aramaki, Director of Innovation at ANA 

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Aramaki, Director of Innovation, All Nippon Airways (ANA) Japan. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As Japan’s largest airline, operating around 1,000 flights per day, we know a thing or two about clouds. Today we’re delighted to announce that we’ll be embarking on a journey to a cloud of a very different kind — with Google’s cloud based tools Google Apps for Business — to communicate and collaborate more easily.

Starting in April, all our 33,000 staff across 40 company divisions, from pilots and cabin attendants to HR and finance staff, will use Gmail, Google Drive and Google Talk.

As a global business, we have people working all over the world. Now it doesn't matter if our staff are on tarmacs in Tokyo, offices in London, or on-the-go in the streets of Beijing, they’ll be able to communicate and collaborate in real time, using Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides from their PCs, smartphones or tablets. As well as removing the barriers of distance, the move to Google Apps will also help us break down language barriers with Google Talk’s translation feature.

Google Apps offers us the reliability and scalability we need. We coordinate flights for 2.7 million passengers to 81 local and international destinations every year, so it is critical we have a communication system that we can rely on. With Gmail we’ll not only have this reliability and scale, we’ll also no longer have to dedicate resources to maintaining and operating our email system as we can rely on Google’s infrastructure.

For over 60 years ANA has flown passengers around the world in comfort and safety. As we launch into our next decade were looking forward to smooth sailing into the cloud with Google Apps for Business and creating a more innovative, flexible and productive style of work.