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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