Sigma-Aldrich taps Google Apps to enable real-time collaboration

Posted by Silji Abraham, CIO, Sigma-Aldrich Corporation  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Silji Abraham, CIO at Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, a life science and high technology company with more than 9,000 employees and operations in over 40 countries. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say. Can you tell us about Sigma-Aldrich and your decision to move to Google Apps? Sigma-Aldrich is a leading life science and high technology company whose products are used in scientific research and disease diagnosis, and as key components in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Our customers include more than 1.4 million scientists and technologists in life science companies, university and government institutions, hospitals and industry. We have a global team of more than 9,000 employees, who produce and distribute more than 230,000 products to over 40 countries and provide excellent service worldwide. Like many other organizations, our employees around the world create significant amounts of unstructured data in various forms to support our business and our customers. We started exploring Google Apps as a global collaboration platform to bring this unstructured content in real-time to every employee anywhere, irrespective of the device. How does Google Apps fit into your vision to change and improve the way employees work? Just as Sigma-Aldrich accelerates customers’ success through innovative products, customized solutions and unsurpassed service, our Information Technology group does the same for our internal customers. Our entire employee population benefits from the innovative, collaborative nature of Google Apps. At our recent sales meeting, for example, we relied on the Google Apps platform to make the week completely paperless. Key documents and up-to-date information were available and accessible to the team from their phones, tablets and laptops, and we didn’t have to waste any money printing things out or time worrying about changes to the plans along the way. How is Google Apps changing the way you manage your IT?  Consumerization has driven significant changes in how the best businesses satisfy the collaboration needs of their employees. Now that we’re on Google Apps, we have a single platform that solves these needs across the enterprise, without the need for third-party add-ons. It’s easier to manage and provides a true consumerized experience for all our users. From an IT management perspective, we’ve simplified our collaboration platform significantly. What role does Google Apps play in the strategy and success of your recruiting plans? College graduates today are quite familiar with the consumerization of IT, such as Gmail and the Google Apps collaboration platform. I think this familiarity helps new employees acclimate to our business environment in a shorter period of time, increasing their efficiency and productivity. What are you most excited about as you adopt Google Apps across the company? I’m particularly excited about three specific things when it comes to our switch to Google Apps. First, we’re able to make all of our unstructured data available for collaboration to all employees, in real-time, on any device, supported by a full content search. Second, hundreds of disparate, custom-built small applications are naturally finding their way into Google Apps because of the power of a homogenous platform. These applications provide additional ways for real-time collaboration and a better user experience. Third, using Hangouts has already made us more productive as an organization, and we’ve only just begun. Jumping in on a video conference is no longer a siloed process. It’s seamlessly integrated with the flow of emailing a colleague or sharing a Google Doc. Finally, let me just say that with Google Apps, I believe we’re supporting the core mission of Sigma-Aldrich internally to our employees. That is, we’re enabling our technology to improve the quality of life of employees, so they can focus their energy on developing and delivering the highest quality products and services to our customers.

Avery Dennison drives a new era of innovation with Google Apps

Posted by Bhupesh Arora, Senior Director of New Technologies, Avery Dennison  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Bhupesh Arora, Senior Director of New Technologies for Avery Dennison, a global leader in labeling and packaging materials and solutions. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say. Our founder, Stan Avery, invented the self-adhesive label and launched the modern labeling industry when he started Avery Dennison back in 1935. Seventy-eight years later, Avery Dennison products are all around us, in thousands of consumer and industrial applications. And we’re still innovating. Brand-enhancing labeling solutions, RFID-enabled inventory management systems and wearable medical sensors are just some of the products fueling our innovation pipeline. It’s not surprising, then, that Avery Dennison was quick to adopt Google Apps for its global workforce. Enabling collaboration to unleash human creativity through fast, simple and robust digital means is a big step in innovation for us. We also expect significant payback in greater productivity and cost savings. Adopting Google Apps has allowed us to retire costly, less interactive email, intranet and social media platforms and replace them with a single virtual work and collaboration space that’s accessible to our employees anywhere in the world. And Google’s data center and network infrastructure allow us to deliver these services securely and with low latency, regardless of location. Some of our business leaders were concerned about the size and complexity of such a transformation, and with good reason. Managing this kind of change—asking 19,000 computer-based employees to adopt a whole new set of tools in their daily work habits—turned out to be one of the most important parts of the initiative. With the help of Tempus Nova, a Google Apps Reseller and our change management partner, we planned carefully, started small, learned at every step, and built scale and momentum over a 9-month period. We cultivated individual employees to become knowledgeable and enthusiastic Google Guides. And we worked closely with individual business divisions as their employees began adopting Google Apps. It was also a tremendous help to have all our senior leaders become early and visible users of the new tools. Our CIO, Rich Hoffman, was a particularly strong advocate. He championed the initiative from the beginning and immediately incorporated Google Apps into all his personal communications and document-sharing habits. He sent regular emails to the entire company promoting the tools, encouraging employees to explore them and amplifying the excitement that was quick to spread as we rolled out the Google platform around the globe. He knows the benefits of going to the cloud and appreciates how Google has been a full strategic partner throughout the process. Today, nearly all our computer-enabled employees use Google Apps. It’s early in the experience, but we’re already seeing improvements in productivity and user satisfaction. Our employees were hungry for better communications and collaboration tools and the freedom to use them anywhere at any time. They love the speed and stability of their new Chrome browser, and they’re embracing Google Docs for its real-time editing and collaboration capabilities—and its ability to eliminate unnecessary meetings. And everyone is delighted with the easy, ubiquitous access to people and data made possible by a cloud-based platform. Our senior leadership sees a platform that is actively fostering a new era of innovation at Avery Dennison—one built on unfettered creativity and collaboration. All in all, adopting Google Apps has been more than a change in technology for Avery Dennison—it’s a key part of a major transformation in the way we work.

Cloud Platform expands support to Asia Pacific

Posted by Howard Wu, Head of Asia Pacific Marketing for Google Cloud Platform Many of the world’s most successful new companies, from Angry Birds creator Rovio to photo messaging service Snapchat, have built their businesses onGoogle Cloud Platform. We want developers in the Asia-Pacific region to also experience the speed and scale of Google’s infrastructure, so starting today, we are expanding Google Cloud Platform support to include Asia Pacific zones and adding local language tools. Google Cloud Platform is a set of compute, storage and big data products that allow developers to build on top of the same infrastructure and technology that powers Google. The expansion means that local developers across Asia Pacific can now experience better performance and lower latency. Developers around the world will also have access to a broader global network of servers. Japanese game maker Applibot is an early adopter of Cloud Platform in the region and have already used it to build and deploy mobile games globally. With millions of downloads on Google Play and iTunes, the company says Cloud Platform has been critical to their success. Applibot does not need to worry about server maintenance or provisioning new hardware to serve millions of potential users when they ship the latest game. Google Cloud Platform scales smoothly so that the company can focus on what they do best — creating great games. The expansion of Cloud Platform support to Asia is our latest investment we’re making to help businesses work better with cloud based tools as part of Google’sEnterprise business. In addition to local product availability, the Google Cloud Platform website and the developer console will also be available in Japanese andTraditional Chinese. Developers interested in learning more about Google Cloud Platform can join one of the Google Cloud Platform Global Roadshow events coming up in Tokyo, Taipei, Seoul or Hong Kong. For more technical details, head over to the Cloud Platform blog.

Google Apps goes behind the curtains of Glyndebourne opera house

Posted by Richard Wells, Head of Information Technology at Glyndebourne  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Richard Wells, Head of Information Technology at Glyndebourne, a 1,200-seat opera house set in the grounds of a country house in East Sussex, England. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say. English opera company Glyndebourne started out in 1934 as an intimate gathering for opera enthusiasts at the founders’ home. Today it’s a 1,200-seat opera house located in the grounds of a 600-year-old manor in the English countryside. We put on about 120 performances a year, including the annual Glyndebourne Festival in the summer and our traditional Autumn tour, which takes us to cities around England. Before going Google last autumn, we relied on a traditional Microsoft Office, Sharepoint and Exchange infrastructure. This setup required dedicated Windows computers to access all our files on various hard drives and servers, sometimes through complex remote connection processes. It was difficult, stage hands could not always access their email, schedules or documents and often had to use pen and paper to create notes after performance. Google Apps has changed the way we work since employees can now access their work directly from their mobiles. Our House Manager previously had to email the ushers’ schedule to their personal email accounts. It was a tedious process. Now, all our ushers have their own Google accounts and we can share one roster as a Google Sheet and collaborate in one file. Google Apps also helps those of us in headquarters be more efficient and resourceful. Each month our general director posts a popular news bulletin online. It’s lighthearted and informative, and great reading material for a coffee break - this meant many people printed it out to read, like a magazine. Now that we have gone Google we simply pop it up on our mobile devices any place, any time with the added financial benefit of paper and ink savings. With the move to Google our IT staff were excited to be able to stop maintaining the on-premise email system, particularly as our company grew. We have nearly doubled our computer users to 200 in the last few years, while our IT resources stayed the same. As a result, we spent three full days a month maintaining Microsoft applications, updating software and troubleshooting remote employee issues. With Google Apps we now spend a fraction of that time on support and troubleshooting. Under the old system we were running out of storage fast, including storage for our performance videos and sheet music. You can imagine how thrilled we were to learn that a single suite of products -- Google Apps for Business -- could resolve all of our problems around hosting, mobility and collaboration. With the help of Ancoris, a Google Enterprise partner, we quickly deployed and migrated all our computer users to the new ecosystem. We now store just under 500 GB of digital performance material online with Google using Google Drive. With Google giving us email, collaboration, business workflows and our storage needs in the cloud, the IT department has far fewer worries. Staff now spend their time on more meaningful jobs like creating high-quality recordings of our performances and improving our digital presences such as the Glyndebourne YouTube channel. Employees have seen an increase in their ability to focus on our core objective: creating world-class opera. Google Apps helps us bridge the creative and operational sides of the company. This allows us to work from anywhere, anytime so the show goes off without a hitch every night.

London Borough of Barking and Dagenham goes mobile and saves money with Chromebooks

Posted by Rupert Hay-Campbell, Information/Communications Technology and Information Governance Officer, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Rupert Hay-Campbell, information/communications technology and information governance officer for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, a community in East London with 180,000 residents. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say. At the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, we're dealing with a classic government challenge: the need to provide great technology for our 3,500 local council employees in a climate of severe budget austerity. In the middle of 2013 we turned our attention to upgrading our IT platform in preparation for the Windows XP end of life in April 2014. We knew we had to either upgrade our 3,500 desktop computers and 800 laptops or find new ways to give employees access to our council systems, and preferably on devices that didn’t need to be constantly upgraded or managed by our IT staff. Google Chromebooks and Chromeboxes ticked all of these boxes – and more. We want to future-proof our systems based on how our employees will be working five or 10 years from now. They’ll be more mobile, working from home or from various council offices, so they’ll rely on laptops. The applications they’ll use will be web-based, so a device built around a browser makes sense. At the same time, we must also manage council information in strict compliance with UK government security regulations. Once CESG, the UK government agency responsible for IT security, developed security standards for councils using the Chrome operating system, we started switching out XP desktops and laptops with 2,000 Chromebooks for employees and 500 Chromeboxes for reception desks and shared works areas. With the help of Ancoris, a Google Enterprise Partner, and Elevate East London, the council’s joint venture IT outsourcing partner, we're currently rolling out an initial 1,500 Chromebooks. Our partners helped us provide access to council applications via a Citrix virtual desktop, but we’ll gradually move new apps to the Chrome browser. When we finish deploying Chromebooks and Chromeboxes in early summer, we’ll have 1,000 fewer devices to manage compared to our stock of Windows XP devices. Most employees will only have a Chromebook, instead of both a desktop and a laptop. Not only does this help employees bring their work anywhere, it also saves us £200,000 compared with the cost of deploying new Windows desktops, and we’ve estimated a further £200,000 saving on electricity costs with the more energy-efficient ChromeOS devices. And since employees can work anywhere, we’ll be able to make substantial savings on more efficient use of some council buildings and offices. Spending less money on more secure, worker-friendly and flexible technology is helping us at the council deal with the challenge of austerity cuts - and, of course, plan better for the future of our community.