Email the Editor    Email a Friend    Print this Page 

Taylor Woodrow, a UK-based construction company, has switched its 1,800 employees' e-mail from Microsoft Outlook to enterprise Gmail.

The company is also beginning to use other components of Google Apps, the suite of Web-based applications that includes, in addition to Gmail, calendar, chat, word processing, spreadsheets and wikis.

According to Rob Ramsay, Taylor Woodrow's IT director, the company has already realized a cost savings of nearly $2 million in licensing and support costs.

According to Google, Google Apps premier edition for enterprises costs $50 per user per year. In an interview with CIO, Ramsay cited four major lessons from implementing the enterprise version of Gmail and dabbling with Google Apps.

1. Easier E-mail Maintenance

Because Gmail is hosted by Google, Taylor Woodrow doesn't need to put the data on its own servers.

As a result, Ramsay says IT doesn't have to spend time or money maintaining e-mail servers (which is a where some of that $2 million in savings was realized).

This means it frees up IT to work on other applications and systems. Google also handles spam and messaging security, and so eliminates another task Ramsay's IT group had to manage.

This was especially a big deal for Taylor Woodrow, since 50 percent of the company's e-mail user base changes every year, he says.

2. Distributed Model Helps E-mail Security

With Gmail, Ramsay says that data is distributed across many machines on the back-end of Google, a fact he believes boosts e-mail security because it means his vendor is not putting all his eggs in one basket.

"We were determined not to have a single point of attack," Ramsay says. "If we did this [e-mail implementation] in a traditional method [on premise], there would have been a single point of attack," he says.

share: