Titans of Japanese business embrace the cloud

Posted by Shinichi Abe, Managing Director, Enterprise Business Japan

Since launching Google Apps for Business in Japan in 2007, we’ve seen some of the country’s best known companies embrace the simplicity and freedom of working in the cloud. The likes of Casio, Benesse and Kewpie Corporation are now using Google Apps for Business products, to work more collaboratively and efficiently.

Today, two of Japan's most venerable companies Kubota and FUJIFILM are making the leap to the cloud too. This news comes just a month afterANA announced that its 43,000 staff across 40 company divisions will soon use Google Apps for Business and Nikkei ranked Google as the nation’s number one cloud service provider.

Established in 1890, Kubota is an international leader in agricultural machinery manufacturing, with more than 20,000 staff across 20 countries. Overseas sales make up more than 50% of its business. As Kubota looks to increase its business abroad to 70% in the next five years, it will adopt Google Apps as an IT and communications solution. Google Apps will help Kubota facilitate a smooth overseas expansion by enabling employees to connect and collaborate real time across borders.

FUJIFILM is also on a path of international expansion. A household name in photography and imaging, FUJIFILM is now applying its world-class technology to the medical systems and life sciences sectors. As their business evolves they want an IT platform that is its fast and flexible so plan to move their 30,000-strong workforce to the cloud, Gmail and Google Drive.

Kubota and FUJIFILM join over 5 million businesses worldwide that have moved to Google Apps for Business. Enhanced with the features and controls that businesses need to be productive, innovative and successful, Google’s workplace tools are giving some of the world’s oldest and most established businesses a 21st century edge.

Report from Down Under: Woolworths goes Google

Posted by Dan Beecham, CIO at Woolworths Limited

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dan Beecham, CIO at Woolworths Limited. Woolworths is an Australian company that was founded in 1924 in Sydney. Today Woolworths has more than 3,000 stores across Australia and New Zealand that span food, liquor, petrol, general merchandise, home improvement and hotels. 

As one of Australia and New Zealand’s most innovative retailers, we’re always looking for ways we can use technology to give our customers more convenient ways to shop — whether that’s in store, from the comfort of their computer at home, or on the move via our smartphone apps.

This innovative approach does not stop with our customers. As Australia’s largest retailer with more than 3,000 stores across Australia and New Zealand, our staff of 200,000 need intuitive technology that enables them to work more efficiently, collaboratively and effectively. To do this, they need to be able to access the right applications and information, from any location, using any device.

This is why we’ve decided to move to Google Apps and Chrome. Changing to a cloud based suite of tools is a key part of our strategy to use technology to promote greater collaboration, productivity and effectiveness. Over the next 12 months we will be rolling out Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk to the 26,000 staff in our national and state offices. This is the first phase of what we hope will be a company-wide transformation of our workplace technology.

We are also actively looking at how we can innovate with Google+, Google Drive and Google Sites to transform the way we approach other aspects of our business.

The move to Google Apps and Chrome builds on the successful roll out of Gmail and our ‘Tap to Support’ App on iPads to Woolworths supermarket store managers last year. The custom-made application, built on Google App Engine, helps our managers stay on the shop floor and focused on customers by allowing them to log a support ticket with our national support office in just one click rather than being tied to a PC in the back office.

Soon more of our staff will be able to experience the productive and collaborative benefits of being able to work from any device, anywhere. Geographically dispersed teams, like our merchandising or state based workers, will be able to use Docs to collaborate in real-time.

Going Google will transform the way our employees interact with technology and collaborate with each other at every level of the organisation. We’re looking forward to providing our staff access to intuitive consumer technology at work and see the move to Google as the beginning of our journey towards a more efficient and innovative style of working.

For Malaysia: Bringing Google Apps and Chromebooks to the classroom

Posted by Felix Lin, Director of Product Management 

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Chrome Blog.)

As a parent of three kids, I have the same aspirations as many other parents and educators—to provide them with the best opportunities to learn and discover their passions. For many students, the web has become an incredible resource for the classroom, offering tools to work collaboratively, share and research. School systems of all sizes—from a single primary school to an entire country such as the Philippines—have “Gone Google” in their schools and embraced the web to transform education.

Today the country of Malaysia is going a step further by adopting Google Apps for 10 million students, teachers and parents. As part of this initiative they are also deploying Chromebooks to primary and secondary schools nationwide. These efforts to integrate the web are a central part of a national plan (PDF) to reform its educational system.

To deploy technology across a nationwide school system, computers need to be simple, manageable and secure. Chromebooks are ideal for learning and sharing in the classroom—there’s nothing complicated to learn, they boot up in seconds and have virus protection built in. They also offer easy setup and deployment, which means they’re ready to go the moment a student opens the lid and logs in. And with reduced overhead costs, Chromebooks are a cost-efficient option* to deploy technology at scale.

To date, more than 3,000 schools worldwide, from Edina, Minnesota to Point England, New Zealand, have deployed Chromebooks to improve attendance and graduation rates, make learning more fun and enable students to take more ownership for their learning.

The web gives our children and students new opportunities to access the world’s information and work collaboratively. We look forward to working with national and regional leaders to make the most of the web with Google Apps and Chromebooks and help them provide the best opportunities to every student. 

Dick Smith switches on to Google Apps

Posted by Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith, an electronics retailer in Australia and New Zealand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say. 

As an electronics retailer, you can imagine that staff at Dick Smith have a real passion for technology. They not only want to keep customers up-to-date with the latest innovations and gadgets — they want to use them too. This is key to our culture and as our company evolves we want to ensure that our highly mobile, tech savvy workforce have the flexibility to work in ways that suit them.

With more than 4,500 staff in 323 stores across Australia and New Zealand, we have a lot of people to communicate with. Connecting with part-time staff who don’t have corporate issued devices or email accounts, managing the rise of personal mobile devices at work, and trying to introduce more collaboration are some of the main challenges we’ve faced.

When we looked for solutions to these challenges, we decided on Google Apps because it was a great cultural fit, and it was intuitive, easy to maintain and packed with features. As many of our staff already use Gmail for their personal email account the training time is really minimal.



The sharing and collaboration features built into Google Apps and Google Docs are real pluses too. Whether our teams are in Sydney or Wellington, they'll be able to share and collaborate on documents in real-time, faster and more easily than ever before. We’re also looking forward to storing videos in Drive so when our CEO has an important announcement, we can record this for all our staff to review at a time that suits them. This is a great way to overcome some of the logistical challenges of having a part-time workforce in different time zones.

Overall, we see building community and fostering a collaborative culture as the greatest benefit to ‘Going Google.’ We’re looking forward to using Google Forms to get staff feedback and comments via regular staff engagement surveys and we’re even looking to extend our new collaborative approach to our interactions with suppliers and partners. Ultimately it’s about using the right tools so we can get down to running our business – and Google Apps lets us do that.

Enterasys has gone Google.

Posted by Dan Petlon, CIO of Enterasys 

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. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Dan Petlon, 2012 Boston Business Journal CIO of the year and CIO of Enterasys, a global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions with a strong Boston presence. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

Change in information technology (IT) can be tough. Employees have to learn a new interface and get used to a different way of doing everyday things. But that change is often tougher for CIOs and IT managers since we also have to manage migrating data, handling questions and buying or upgrading hardware. So when we started switching the majority of the company’s infrastructure over to the cloud, I prepared for an uphill battle.

We had been using Microsoft Exchange for more than 14 years and it was starting to outlive its usefulness. Tools that we relied on in Exchange 2007 didn’t work when we upgraded to the 2010 version, calendaring was messy and mobile syncing was even tougher. Our Sharepoint server – the center of collaboration for the company – was just not working.

Our search for a cloud-based email and collaboration system came down to Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. While our 1,200 employees were used to Microsoft's tools, we weren't convinced their solution fully understood the cloud; Office 365 still required us to install software and hardware. Google Apps was entirely cloud-based and offered everything we needed with a single license - it was the right way to go for us. We switched last summer with the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas.

Our staff quickly adopted Gmail and Google Calendar and also tried out Google Docs, finding that it makes creating presentations and sharing information with each other and outside partners much easier. Our sales managers have started using Google+ Hangouts for preliminary interviews with remote job candidates in order to get a more personal first interview with them before bringing them into the office. We’re also in the process of finally getting rid of our Sharepoint server by migrating the information over to Google Sites and Google Drive. Our Quality Assurance team has about 100 people who all use Sites and Drive to store, organize and share every document they create. Now it’s become company policy: every document that’s created internally is made using a Google Doc!

Google Apps has also helped us make mobility simple for our employees. Their email and calendars are always synced, there’s never any downtime or connectivity issues, like there were with Exchange, and they have all their Docs with them anytime they need them. Almost a year later, our support tickets have dropped over 60 percent and we’ve saved more than $300,000.

In about one year of running Google Apps, 272 new features have been pushed out to our company. That’s an impressive pace and something that would have seemed impossible before, but I see it as the luxury of cloud computing. While change can seem daunting, we’re really happy to have Google Apps as our guide.

Clear skies ahead: The Weather Company forecasts success using Google Apps

Posted by Bryson, Koehler, CIO of The Weather Company

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Bryson Koehler, CIO of The Weather Company, the parent company of The Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground, the most popular sources of weather news and information on television and online. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Most people know The Weather Company from checking out the forecast on TV or from using our mobile app, but we actually do much, much more. Beyond our TV channel and online presence, we sell weather data to business and foreign governments, as well as sell graphic capabilities to local network affiliates. We’re a big, complex organization with a lot of smart people who need the right tools to do their work. It’s my job to make sure those needs are being met.

When I joined the company last summer, one of my first responsibilities was to get all our employees on the same email and collaboration platform. The Weather Company has grown quite a bit through acquisitions during the past year, leaving our 1,200 employees all over the world using a mixed bag of tools. Each business was still working as an independent entity, so getting everyone under the same technological umbrella was crucial to us moving forward.

The choice came down to Google Apps and Microsoft® Office 365. We knew there were strong allegiances to each platform within the company, so there was no clear winner at first. After taking a closer look at Office 365, though, it seemed like a set of individual tools rather than a fully integrated suite like Google Apps. On top of that, Google Apps’ single user licensing was far less complicated than Microsoft’s model. Ultimately, Google Apps was a better fit for our company.

About two months ago we rolled out Google Apps with the help of Google Enterprise partner, Cloud Sherpas. Though change management was definitely a large undertaking, we do feel that the switch brought the company together. It helped us untether people from the traditional corporate collaboration approach of searching through multiple versions and waiting as documents were passed from one to another - something I desperately wanted to do. The culture of our company and the IT department is changing, and Google Apps was a great catalyst to get that moving in the right direction.

We’ve only been live for a short time, but Google Apps has already changed how we work. Google Docs have caught on like wildfire, and people can work from anywhere as long as they have Internet. I see people bouncing around between their laptop, a tablet, their Android phone or whatever – it’s seamless. We’ve also started using Google Drive to replace personal Box and Dropbox accounts that people had been using to share documents, so we’ll have centralized control of our intellectual property. We’re going to roll out Google+ companywide to replace Yammer, although Google+ Hangouts have begun to spread organically. Our marketing, sales and PR teams all use Hangouts to meet, and one employee set up a Google Chromebox and a monitor to create a Hangout station in his office.

Google Apps has created a real sense of excitement at The Weather Company. People are really exploring and embracing it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to see. As we’re abandoning the traditional top-down IT department mindset, all I can do is provide a toolkit for people to work with. Google Apps gives them those tools and lets them work.

Improved Gmail search for Google Apps customers

Posted: 04 Apr 2013 01:23 PM PDT

Posted by Raviv Nagel, Gmail Software Engineer

At work and school, being able to find things quickly is important. So today, Google Apps customers will have access to autocomplete predictions in your Gmail search boxes to make getting the information you want faster than ever before.

When you start typing in the Gmail search box, you’ll now see predictions display. Those predictions are based on the content of your email as well as past searches and contacts. So, if you always look for messages from your business partner or the title of your current project, you won’t wear out the keys on your keyboard by repeating the same search. For example, you may now see your coworker named Anna, your past search of annual report and announcement from a recent email you received after typing "ann" into the search box.

If Anna is in your contacts, you’ll see a picture of her and any other contacts to quickly make sure you’re choosing the right person, such as someone at your company and not a reporter or competitor who has the same name.

These features will be available globally over the next few days to Rapid Release domains.

Pure and Proven Cloud: Gmail Availability in 2012

Posted by Venkat Panchapakesan, Vice President of Engineering

Millions of businesses around the world rely on Google Apps to get work done every day. So, much like keeping Google search up and running, it’s a top priority for us to make sure Google Apps is available whenever (and wherever) you need it. For customers using Google Apps for Business, Education or Government, we offer a 99.9% availability guarantee, with zero scheduled downtime for maintenance. In 2010 and 2011, the actual availability for Gmail was significantly better than this guarantee. This was true again last year. In 2012, Gmail achieved 99.983% availability while at the same time adding dozens of new features. This translates to an average of just over seven minutes of service disruption per month over the last year, and most users experienced no disruption at all.  

We’re proud of our track record, but we know our work is never done. All our products are built by people -- and because humans aren’t perfect, no technology is ever perfect either. We work hard to make sure any disruptions are rare, limited in scale and quickly resolved. And in the unlikely event something does go wrong, it’s important for our users to know. To that end, you can see the current status of any Google Apps service on the Google Apps status dashboard, a public website, at any time.