Our people weigh in on the issues of the day.

Blue Slate's people think a lot about the challenges facing their industries today. In the process, they often come up with completely unexpected slants on current issues, or new ways of thinking about business problems. Bluespeak is where they share those thoughts. Feel free to read and reflect.

[Any views or opinion represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blogger and do not represent those of Blue Slate Solutions.]

« Wealth Management... | Main | High Performing... »
Why I Love Google (and Saas)

Recently when talking business over dinner with my wife, she sarcastically said to me “You really love Google”.  My response was, “I do… I truly love Google”.  And here is why…

As with many organizations, we live and die through our email communications and calendaring.  As Blue Slate has grown at quite a good clip over the past few years, our internal e-mail infrastructure was showing its age.  Load times were slow, messages and appointments were getting lost, we couldn’t synch over the air, and our users were getting quite upset.  Worse yet, productivity was taking a hit… which equates directly to our bottom line.

With that, we made the decision to move to a new email/calendaring platform.  Following our standard consultative model, we first looked at the requirements the business was presenting to us…

  1. Over the air synch with smartphones – this was a big one
  2. No lost messages or calendar items – this goes without saying
  3. Web access and Outlook compatibility
  4. Cost effective

We looked at several options from both a hosted and in-house perspective.  In the end, we decided to move to the cloud and move to Google Apps.  This was, in my mind, a game changing decision for Blue Slate.

Google Apps provides us with a secure, hosted environment for our e-mail, calendar, IM, and documents.  This consolidated several disparate systems we had into one.  Also, eMail and calendaring is now truly a commodity, so why would we want to host extra equipment (Exchange server, BlackBerry Enterprise sever, etc) and skills when Google can manage all of this for us at a FRACTION of the cost?  It was a no brainer.

From a smart-phone perspective, the team here is slowly migrating to phones with the Android OS.  The system works with all other smart-phones (iPhone, BlackBerrys, etc), but the integration with the Android OS is fast and seamless… further freeing up our IS team to focus on more value added efforts.

With Blue Slate, the Software as a Services (SaaS) that Google provides with Google Apps was the perfect solution for us.  I’d be happy to discuss if you have any thoughts or plans on moving to the cloud or to any type of SaaS model.

Wednesday April 21, 2010 | By Chris Garber  |  Comments[0]

Comments:

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed