Case study: Valeo makes switch to Google Apps

Valeo has started deploying Google Apps Premier Edition to its 30,000 business users

Google has said that over a million businesses now use its on-demand Google Apps suite, which includes email, calendar and word processing applications, while up to 3,000 new businesses sign up every day.

While some firms remain challenged by the idea of deploying a very different model to traditional on-premise applications offered by the likes of Microsoft and IBM, and are hesitant to store data outside their firewall, a growing number of organisations are evidently taking the plunge.

Automotive supplier Valeo announced this month that the group’s 30,000 employees would be moved from Lotus Notes to Google Apps Premier Edition, and Google hailed the contract win as the largest deployment of Google Apps in the enterprise space. The move follows take-ups by other large organisations such as the Washington DC government, the Telegraph Media group and the London University of Westminster.

Valeo said it was both the need to cut costs and to find a more collaborative solution that made it consider Google Apps for business use.

Google’s Premier Edition suite includes business email, calendar and document capabilities for a fee of £33 per user per year, a cost that is roughly half the price charged by on-premise suite suppliers, according to Valeo. Collaborative aspects of the suite include Google Video for private video sharing and Google Sites to create and share web pages.

A Valeo spokesman said the IT department had been about to migrate business users to Lotus Notes R8 but before doing so considered a range of offers from other service providers.

“It was an opportunity to analyse the offers from other providers and to choose the solution which matches best with our requirements,” he said.

Valeo started piloting Google Apps about a year ago for 3,000 users. The full rollout followed in April this year to all staff in 27 different companies.

“The pilot period gave us enough time to experience Google Apps and also the capacity of Google to progress, as we have seen the different services evolving very quickly,” said the spokesman.

Valeo said the IT department had not demanded that employees stop using Microsoft Office tools straight away, even though the instalment of Google Apps means users will now have two versions of many business applications.

“We expect that the change will not be provoked by a forced change of tools, but a natural change of usage,” said the spokesman. “A lot of collaborators are already replacing Microsoft Office tools with Google Docs in order to simplify processes and ways of working,” he added.