Taylor Woodrow uses Google Apps to cut costs
Construction firm Taylor Woodrow expects to save £1m over the next three years by switching its 1,800 staff from desktop applications to Google Apps.
The construction, facilities management and engineering subsidiary of Taylor Wimpey is one the latest companies Google has signed up for its software-as-a-service offering since 2006.
Taylor Woodrow has been using the Google Search Appliance for the past two years to manage the retrieval of documents on its intranet.
Rob Ramsay, IT director at Taylor Woodrow, said the move would eliminate costs for separate web security and filtering products as well as the licensing costs.
"Google Apps will enable us to scale up and down as required much more easily and in a much more cost-efficient way than the traditional client and server models we looked at, and it includes all support in the package," Rob Ramsay said.
One of the reasons for the move was to improve communications.
"Google Apps was a perfect match because many of our staff are mobile workers and need to be able to access work applications from a variety of different locations and that is specifically what it is designed to do," Ramsay said.
He said Taylor Woodrow had a good data communications infrastructure to cope with bandwidth requirements, but would switch to a variety of wireless communications when necessary.
Another important reason for the switch was to improve Taylor Woodrow's business continuity resilience.
"We wanted to ensure that there was no single point of failure and by switching to Google Apps we are able to tap into business continuity resources that we could not afford on our own," said Ramsay.
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