Posted by Hari Ravichandran, CEO and Founder, Endurance International Group
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Hari Ravichandran, CEO and Founder of Endurance International Group, which helps small businesses get online and manage their web presence.
Launching a small business is tough, and getting a website up and running along with marketing your company online can seem especially daunting. At Endurance, we realized way back in 1997 that the Internet was going to change how small businesses reach and serve their customers, and that bringing the power of the Internet to them was both a great business opportunity and a way to support aspiring business owners globally. So we built our company around helping SMBs manage their web presence with hosting, domains, email, design and online marketing. With Endurance doing the technical heavy lifting, SMBs can focus more on growing their companies and making them succeed.
Google Apps for Work is now is now an integral part of our e-mail and cloud productivity offering we recommend and provide to our customers, and it’s going to make business owners’ lives easier. How do we know? Because we started using Google Apps ourselves, and we’ve seen firsthand how we’ve used it to connect more often with our teams, get projects done faster and save money.
Today we serve over 3.7 million small businesses around the world, and we operate a number of leading brands such as
iPage,
Bluehost,
HostGator and
Domain.com from offices around the globe. In such an environment, communication is important. In the past, it took too many actions to complete simple tasks — sending emails back and forth, with employees from different offices not easily able to collaborate on documents or see each others’ calendars to schedule meetings. That all changed when we moved to Google Apps.
We knew of Google Apps and wanted to use the suite, which has all the e-mail, calendar and document-sharing features we needed to run our business. Many of our employees had personal
Gmail addresses, so they were already familiar with Google and were genuinely excited about making the switch. Our IT department was equally happy about the short learning curve for Apps, since it made migrating our employees over to Apps surprisingly easy.
Perhaps the best part about our move to Google Apps is the ability to communicate with our colleagues across the company, no matter what country we’re based in. We talk to each other and keep in touch far more often than we used to, thanks to
Hangouts and Google+. Since Google Apps has everything we need, from file storage to video calls, we will no longer rely on expensive or hard-to-use video conferencing, email, and file storage solutions.
We have built a relationship with Google to help small businesses harness the power of the web in multiple ways, first through the AdWords Referral program, and more recently via joint programs in the US, India, Africa and Southeast Asia including the “
Get Your Business Online” program. Once we saw how quickly Google Apps changed the way we work, we wanted to share it with our small-business customers. That’s why we’re excited to be joining the Google for Work Partner Program. We’re integrating Google Apps with the dashboard that our customers use to manage their businesses, like email marketing and website design, so customers can have one seamless experience working with their website and productivity apps. And since we use Google Apps everyday ourselves we can help our customers get the most value out of it.
Google Apps fits in perfectly with our philosophy of guiding small businesses to success – not simply getting online but being online. When you have an easy-to-use solution like Google Apps, working together on projects, accessing documents from anywhere, and keeping costs in check becomes part of doing business every day.
