At Kempinksi Hotels, we believe we are personally responsible for creating rich and meaningful experiences for each of our guests. As Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group, it’s important to us that we provide perfection for our guests, whether that’s planning their wedding or just making sure they’re comfortable in a city they’re visiting for the first time.
As we began planning our five year strategy in 2010, we recognized the need to free operational resources from IT and find ways to work together across 70 hotels in 30 countries to continue providing best-in-class guest experiences. We found that moving to the cloud would allow us to reduce the overall cost of ownership and IT administration at each individual hotel so they could focus on driving efficiencies out of applications instead of just maintaining them. Quickly moving all of our properties to the cloud became a key part of our broader business strategy.
After considering cloud email platforms from Microsoft and Lotus, we found Google Apps to be the most mature solution and would allow us to collaborate easily across hotels and offices around the world. With the help of Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS), we transferred existing messages, appointments and contacts from GroupWise to Google Apps using their CloudMigrator multi-platform migration suite.
Now that we’ve fully migrated our 5,000 employees, we feel like we have an email platform that allows us to easily scale our business across each location, adding and removing users in a matter of minutes. We’re excited about being on a platform that continues to innovate and release features like instant translation in Gmail, Google+ Hangouts in Gmail, and document storage and collaboration using Google Drive. Moving to Google Apps was key to reducing the overall cost of ownership and cost of administration to the hotels, but we believe that the true benefits will come from the creative ways our employees use these tools to work together and provide an even better experience for our guests in the coming years.
As our business grew in Brazil, we found ourselves faced with a number of IT challenges. One of our biggest obstacles was communicating between our locations in Brazil and our headquarters in France. We found that our calendar system was so unreliable that our own directors would use their personal Google Calendars to share events with one another. With a growing retail business - regularly opening new stores and traveling between different locations - we knew we needed an IT platform with more flexibility, mobility, and reliability if we wanted to keep our employees and customers happy.
That’s why we moved our 2,100 IT users to Google Apps for Business last year. With Google Apps, our team is now able to work together easily and much more efficiently, while providing a much better experience for our customers. When a customer wants to know if an item is in stock, our sales rep can immediately chat with our logistics team using Google Talk and verify the inventory in real time. We can also now share calendars across our stores and with headquarters in France, which allow us to better manage our promotions and events, and helps us to always know what’s happening across the Atlantic.
Google Apps for Business not only helped us streamline our business, but the costs savings have been substantial. We’ve been able to cancel our antispam and antivirus contacts saving us $25,000 per year and Google+ Hangouts have saved us from having to make a $100,000 investment in videoconferencing technology. On top of that, we ended up saving $200,000 in infrastructure and maintenance costs that we would’ve spent setting up users on our old IT system last year.
It’s clear that Google Apps for Business was the right choice for us: in a recent company survey, our employees gave Google Apps a 95 percent satisfaction rating. It’s so rewarding for me to know that these tools are helping us provide a better experience for our customers and our employees.
Since we launched Google Apps Vault, many businesses have adopted it to archive, retain and manage business critical information. Starting today, Vault is available for Google Apps for Government customers. Federal, state and local agencies in the United States can now purchase Vault to help meet their compliance needs.
Google Apps Vault helps protect organizations of all sizes from legal and compliance risks through advanced message archiving, retention and eDiscovery capabilities. It provides the ability to quickly search, identify, preserve and export information in response to litigation, investigation, compliance audits, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Vault helps organizations cull through their data and find messages relevant to such requests, reducing the associated time, effort, and costs.
Google Apps Vault can also be used to address knowledge management needs. It enables authorized users to search, manage, and review data. For example, if an employee leaves abruptly and the organization needs to understand the status of the employee’s projects, Vault will help find the needed information. Customers using Vault can ensure that data with critical business information are preserved and can be reviewed.
Vault built on the same infrastructure as Google Apps and recently completed an SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Type II SOC 2 audit. Visit our Google Apps for Government page where you can find more details as well as contact our sales team.
We had been using Microsoft® Office for years, with several Microsoft® Exchange servers across the company, but it became increasingly difficult for our IT team to stay up and running with the uptick in support calls due to a dated system. After exploring various options at different price points, we knew we wanted to move to a cloud-based solution to work more efficiently and provide a scalable and reliable solution.
We invited Google reseller, Sheepdog, to conduct a two-day Google Apps for Business workshop for a small group of employees from various levels and departments within the company. During the workshop, employees evaluated Google Apps against our “success criteria,” which included ease of use, efficiency, functionality, speed and cost. We quickly realized that Google Apps was a good fit for our geographically dispersed company and in July we started moving more than 1,000 employees to Google Apps.
Our IT support calls for email plummeted overnight, demonstrating just how easy it is to use Google Apps. For a global company, being able to instantly translate messages in Gmail and use Google+ Hangouts to meet “in person” made the language and geographical barriers easier to overcome. We’ve also estimated that by going Google we will reduce our costs over the long term when compared to the cost of upgrading and maintaining our old infrastructure. As a public company, we’re thrilled with the savings and new ways of working that we discovered by moving to the cloud.
In 2009, we decided we needed to move all of our agents, in more than 80 locations, off of various email systems, including Microsoft® Exchange, onto one platform. This would keep operational costs down and allow our agents and support teams to communicate more effectively. Since our agents rarely come into an office, access from any device was critical.
Today, nearly four years after our initial implementation, Google Apps has dramatically increased productivity and transformed our business. Now, our agents are using Google Docs to collaborate with each other on projects and can meet virtually anywhere using Google+ Hangouts to share ideas and best practices from their experience. With no more servers or software licenses, we reduced our projected costs from other solutions by almost 70 percent. That kind of savings delivers true value to our bottom line.
As a company, we have been able to leverage Google APIs to help us be efficient. When an agent joins or leaves the team, our provisioning system manages all account items with our Google integration.
In addition to the add/change user administration, we utilize Google Groups to constantly maintain distribution lists for email and control file security related to GoogleDrive/Docs. This automated maintenance promotes increased use of Docs collaborative capabilities. An office manager never has to worry about sharing docs or managing a distribution list again.
After this successful integration, we integrated our CRM platform with the Google calendar. All of our agent appointments are pushed to Google Calendar and then to their mobile phone automatically. Any update on the phone is then reversed and posted back to Google and CRM. We were able to leverage the Google platform and its APIs to deliver for the business without incremental licensing costs.
When it comes to recruiting and sustaining our growth, Google Apps has been instrumental in helping us hire new agents quickly while ensuring that they are equipped with the information they need to be successful. With all their documents, calendars and email accessible on the go, our agents are always connected to each other and clients, no matter where they are. This platform has really helped our teams stay connected and collaborate in ways they hadn’t imagined.
IT is no longer a barrier and no one has to wait to meet with someone from the IT department to get going with Google Apps. In fact, I personally haven’t had to pick up the phone once to call an email administrator. It has been truly amazing to see the natural adoption of the product by our field agents.
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