Google Data

Since launching Google Apps for Business in Japan in 2007, we’ve seen some of the country’s best known companies embrace the simplicity and freedom of working in the cloud. The likes of Casio, Benesse and Kewpie Corporation are now using Google Apps for Business products, to work more collaboratively and efficiently.

Today, two of Japan’s most venerable companies Kubota and FUJIFILM are making the leap to the cloud too. This news comes just a month after ANA announced that its 43,000 staff across 40 company divisions will soon use Google Apps for Business and Nikkei ranked Google as the nation’s number one cloud service provider.

Established in 1890, Kubota is an international leader in agricultural machinery manufacturing, with more than 20,000 staff across 20 countries. Overseas sales make up more than 50% of its business. As Kubota looks to increase its business abroad to 70% in the next five years, it will adopt Google Apps as an IT and communications solution. Google Apps will help Kubota facilitate a smooth overseas expansion by enabling employees to connect and collaborate real time across borders.

FUJIFILM is also on a path of international expansion. A household name in photography and imaging, FUJIFILM is now applying its world-class technology to the medical systems and life sciences sectors. As their business evolves they want an IT platform that is its fast and flexible so plan to move their 30,000-strong workforce to the cloud, Gmail and Google Drive.

Kubota and FUJIFILM join over 5 million businesses worldwide that have moved to Google Apps for Business. Enhanced with the features and controls that businesses need to be productive, innovative and successful, Google’s workplace tools are giving some of the world’s oldest and most established businesses a 21st century edge.

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Chrome Blog.)

As a parent of three kids, I have the same aspirations as many other parents and educators—to provide them with the best opportunities to learn and discover their passions. For many students, the web has become an incredible resource for the classroom, offering tools to work collaboratively, share and research. School systems of all sizes—from a single primary school to an entire country such as the Philippines—have “Gone Google” in their schools and embraced the web to transform education.

Today the country of Malaysia is going a step further by adopting Google Apps for 10 million students, teachers and parents. As part of this initiative they are also deploying Chromebooks to primary and secondary schools nationwide. These efforts to integrate the web are a central part of a national plan (PDF) to reform its educational system.

To deploy technology across a nationwide school system, computers need to be simple, manageable and secure. Chromebooks are ideal for learning and sharing in the classroom—there’s nothing complicated to learn, they boot up in seconds and have virus protection built in. They also offer easy setup and deployment, which means they’re ready to go the moment a student opens the lid and logs in. And with reduced overhead costs, Chromebooks are a cost-efficient option* to deploy technology at scale.

To date, more than 3,000 schools worldwide, from Edina, Minnesota to Point England, New Zealand, have deployed Chromebooks to improve attendance and graduation rates, make learning more fun and enable students to take more ownership for their learning.

The web gives our children and students new opportunities to access the world’s information and work collaboratively. We look forward to working with national and regional leaders to make the most of the web with Google Apps and Chromebooks and help them provide the best opportunities to every student.

*In research sponsored by Google, research firm IDC found that Chromebooks yield three-year cost of ownership savings of $1,135 per device compared to traditional PCs or tablets, require 69% fewer hours to deploy and 92% fewer hours to manage. Learn more.

Editor’s note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Justin Hiltz, Media Futurist at Johnny Cupcakes, a designer, manufacturer and retailer of unique, limited edition t-shirts founded in Boston. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We’re fans of individuality and expression at Johnny Cupcakes. Our t-shirts are specially made in small batches to help express and reflect our customer’s unique styles. This independent ethos helped propel our brand from a cult favorite in our hometown of Boston into a multi-million dollar, international business with stores in London, Los Angeles and, of course, across Massachusetts.

We’ve grown a lot since Johnny Earle started Johnny Cupcakes in 2001, but we’ve always put a premium on staying fresh – both with our designs and the technology we work with. When I joined the company two years ago, I realized our email system was causing more harm than good, especially at the rate we were growing. I knew we needed an upgrade, I knew it didn’t make sense to install a server that required constant maintenance, and I knew most employees were already using Gmail on their own. Moving to Google Apps seemed both attractive and obvious.

Google Apps for Business makes communication a snap. We’ve grown to 50 employees, but still work at the same breakneck speed we did when it was just Johnny hustling to get the company off the ground. That’s why it’s essential to have the tools to keep up with our pace. Google Chat makes that possible. We love that we can send a quick ping to someone with a question, an idea in need of feedback or a project update without having to leave our desks.

Google Apps saves us a lot of time and prevents a lot of headaches. Take our recent website redesign, for example. Our customers are our biggest fans, so we wanted to show them some love by highlighting a handful of them on our new site. At first, the thought of coordinating, collecting and curating that amount of content seemed daunting. I was worried we’d have to use a 3rd party questionnaire app or do everything over email and pull it all together manually (and painstakingly). Then I realized I could do it all through Google Forms. I set up a questionnaire, sent it to our customers, and saw the responses show up in real-time in a single spreadsheet. It saved me hours of work I would’ve wasted emailing, copying and pasting.

Johnny Cupcakes is all about our customers – we love them and they love us. This connection fuels our drive to make clothes that are both exclusive and accessible. Google Apps allows us to communicate more effectively, which helps free up our time so that we can concentrate on the things that really matter: our customers.

Editor’s note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Dan Petlon, 2012 Boston Business Journal CIO of the year and CIO of Enterasys, a global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions with a strong Boston presence. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

Change in information technology (IT) can be tough. Employees have to learn a new interface and get used to a different way of doing everyday things. But that change is often tougher for CIOs and IT managers since we also have to manage migrating data, handling questions and buying or upgrading hardware. So when we started switching the majority of the company’s infrastructure over to the cloud, I prepared for an uphill battle.

We had been using Microsoft Exchange for more than 14 years and it was starting to outlive its usefulness. Tools that we relied on in Exchange 2007 didn’t work when we upgraded to the 2010 version, calendaring was messy and mobile syncing was even tougher. Our Sharepoint server – the center of collaboration for the company – was just not working.

Our search for a cloud-based email and collaboration system came down to Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. While our 1,200 employees were used to Microsoft’s tools, we weren’t convinced their solution fully understood the cloud; Office 365 still required us to install software and hardware. Google Apps was entirely cloud-based and offered everything we needed with a single license – it was the right way to go for us. We switched last summer with the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas.

Our staff quickly adopted Gmail and Google Calendar and also tried out Google Docs, finding that it makes creating presentations and sharing information with each other and outside partners much easier. Our sales managers have started using Google+ Hangouts for preliminary interviews with remote job candidates in order to get a more personal first interview with them before bringing them into the office. We’re also in the process of finally getting rid of our Sharepoint server by migrating the information over to Google Sites and Google Drive. Our Quality Assurance team has about 100 people who all use Sites and Drive to store, organize and share every document they create. Now it’s become company policy: every document that’s created internally is made using a Google Doc!

Google Apps has also helped us make mobility simple for our employees. Their email and calendars are always synced, there’s never any downtime or connectivity issues, like there were with Exchange, and they have all their Docs with them anytime they need them. Almost a year later, our support tickets have dropped over 60 percent and we’ve saved more than $300,000.

In about one year of running Google Apps, 272 new features have been pushed out to our company. That’s an impressive pace and something that would have seemed impossible before, but I see it as the luxury of cloud computing. While change can seem daunting, we’re really happy to have Google Apps as our guide.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith, an electronics retailer in Australia and New Zealand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As an electronics retailer, you can imagine that staff at Dick Smith have a real passion for technology. They not only want to keep customers up-to-date with the latest innovations and gadgets — they want to use them too. This is key to our culture and as our company evolves we want to ensure that our highly mobile, tech savvy workforce have the flexibility to work in ways that suit them.

With more than 4,500 staff in 323 stores across Australia and New Zealand, we have a lot of people to communicate with. Connecting with part-time staff who don’t have corporate issued devices or email accounts, managing the rise of personal mobile devices at work, and trying to introduce more collaboration are some of the main challenges we’ve faced.

When we looked for solutions to these challenges, we decided on Google Apps because it was a great cultural fit, and it was intuitive, easy to maintain and packed with features. As many of our staff already use Gmail for their personal email account the training time is really minimal.

The sharing and collaboration features built into Google Apps and Google Docs are real pluses too. Whether our teams are in Sydney or Wellington, they’ll be able to share and collaborate on documents in real-time, faster and more easily than ever before. We’re also looking forward to storing videos in Drive so when our CEO has an important announcement, we can record this for all our staff to review at a time that suits them. This is a great way to overcome some of the logistical challenges of having a part-time workforce in different time zones.

Overall, we see building community and fostering a collaborative culture as the greatest benefit to ‘Going Google.’ We’re looking forward to using Google Forms to get staff feedback and comments via regular staff engagement surveys and we’re even looking to extend our new collaborative approach to our interactions with suppliers and partners. Ultimately it’s about using the right tools so we can get down to running our business – and Google Apps lets us do that.

Editor’s note: Our guest blogger is Bryson Koehler, CIO of The Weather Company, the parent company of The Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground, the most popular sources of weather news and information on television and online. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Most people know The Weather Company from checking out the forecast on TV or from using our mobile app, but we actually do much, much more. Beyond our TV channel and online presence, we sell weather data to business and foreign governments, as well as sell graphic capabilities to local network affiliates. We’re a big, complex organization with a lot of smart people who need the right tools to do their work. It’s my job to make sure those needs are being met.

When I joined the company last summer, one of my first responsibilities was to get all our employees on the same email and collaboration platform. The Weather Company has grown quite a bit through acquisitions during the past year, leaving our 1,200 employees all over the world using a mixed bag of tools. Each business was still working as an independent entity, so getting everyone under the same technological umbrella was crucial to us moving forward.

The choice came down to Google Apps and Microsoft® Office 365. We knew there were strong allegiances to each platform within the company, so there was no clear winner at first. After taking a closer look at Office 365, though, it seemed like a set of individual tools rather than a fully integrated suite like Google Apps. On top of that, Google Apps’ single user licensing was far less complicated than Microsoft’s model. Ultimately, Google Apps was a better fit for our company.

About two months ago we rolled out Google Apps with the help of Google Enterprise partner, Cloud Sherpas. Though change management was definitely a large undertaking, we do feel that the switch brought the company together. It helped us untether people from the traditional corporate collaboration approach of searching through multiple versions and waiting as documents were passed from one to another – something I desperately wanted to do. The culture of our company and the IT department is changing, and Google Apps was a great catalyst to get that moving in the right direction.

We’ve only been live for a short time, but Google Apps has already changed how we work. Google Docs have caught on like wildfire, and people can work from anywhere as long as they have Internet. I see people bouncing around between their laptop, a tablet, their Android phone or whatever – it’s seamless. We’ve also started using Google Drive to replace personal Box and Dropbox accounts that people had been using to share documents, so we’ll have centralized control of our intellectual property. We’re going to roll out Google+ companywide to replace Yammer, although Google+ Hangouts have begun to spread organically. Our marketing, sales and PR teams all use Hangouts to meet, and one employee set up a Google Chromebox and a monitor to create a Hangout station in his office.

Google Apps has created a real sense of excitement at The Weather Company. People are really exploring and embracing it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to see. As we’re abandoning the traditional top-down IT department mindset, all I can do is provide a toolkit for people to work with. Google Apps gives them those tools and lets them work.

At work and school, being able to find things quickly is important. So today, Google Apps customers will have access to autocomplete predictions in your Gmail search boxes to make getting the information you want faster than ever before.

When you start typing in the Gmail search box, you’ll now see predictions display. Those predictions are based on the content of your email as well as past searches and contacts. So, if you always look for messages from your business partner or the title of your current project, you won’t wear out the keys on your keyboard by repeating the same search. For example, you may now see your coworker named Anna, your past search of annual report and announcement from a recent email you received after typing “ann” into the search box.

If Anna is in your contacts, you’ll see a picture of her and any other contacts to quickly make sure you’re choosing the right person, such as someone at your company and not a reporter or competitor who has the same name.

These features will be available globally over the next few days to Rapid Release domains.

Google Compute Engine gives developers everywhere access to Google’s computing infrastructure. Now you can sign up online for Google Compute Engine with the purchase of Gold Support; you no longer need an invitation or a conversation with sales to get access. We’re also further reducing prices for all instance types by an average of 4%.

Starting at $400/month, Gold support gives you a direct relationship with our experienced support engineers to help you get started or troubleshoot issues across the Google Cloud Platform products.

Since announcing Compute Engine, we’ve expanded geographic coverage, added new instance types, released many new features, and made improvements behind the scenes. Sebastian Stadil of Scalr wrote, in a recent review:

“Google Compute Engine is not just fast. It’s Google fast. In fact, it’s a class of fast that enables new service architectures entirely.”

We’re inspired by the awesome projects being created every day with Google Cloud Platform and can’t wait to see what you create next. If you’re ready to try Compute Engine today, sign up today.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Crystal Brenner, Administrative Assistant for the Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds. See what other organizations that use the Google Search Appliance have to say.

Last year, Macomb County set out to improve public real estate search, to help property owners reduce the risk of real estate fraud, and make it easier for Macomb County property owners to protect their property rights. Along the way we may have created one of the nation’s best and perhaps one of the first high-tech real estate records search and fraud detection tools. We were inspired to act by a CBS 60 Minutes exposé uncovering crucial ownership documents for real estate throughout the nation that are often bogus or even nonexistent.

In the past, Macomb County property records were available on paper or online in an electronic format that only allowed searching on a few, limited fields, such as owner name or property description, indexed differently throughout the years. Inconsistent indexing is an issue for registers of deeds throughout the nation, and it points to the need for a search solution that can find stored electronic deeds with ease.

In partnership with Xerox, we set out to do better and help owners detect potential fraud. We scanned every Macomb County real estate record – millions of public records, from dirt to present day. Because we wanted an intuitive, familiar search interface that would let us look quickly through millions of documents, we immediately chose the Google Search Appliance.

Called the “Super Index,” we launched a public prototype in September 2012. The Super Index currently includes millions of pages of public Macomb County real estate documents, going back all the way to 1818. And each year, we’ll add more than 180,000 new documents.

Users can search the Super Index at no charge. What makes it “super” is that searches may now include all recognized text on the documents, including witness and notary names. Once an individual finds the documents they’re looking for, and reviews a thumbnail to be sure it’s what they need, we either provide a link or send a PDF file of those public documents for $6 per document.

One user said, “This is great stuff! Once again, the Macomb County Clerk/Register of Deed’s office is providing the public with a useful tech-savvy resource to gain easy access to public information, with the convenience [of access] from one’s home or office.”

For many people, owning a home is a key part of the American Dream, and we wanted to give our citizens in Macomb the power to protect that dream. We took bold action to combat fraud and educate homeowners about their rights and property. With help from Xerox and the Google Search Appliance, Macomb County is making the search for the American Dream a little easier.

Join us for a Google Hangout On Air on April 24, 2013 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST to see for yourself how the Google Search Appliance is making a difference in our city.

You know the drill. Dreary two hour meetings you can’t wait to escape. Emails that go on forever without getting to the point. Another invite to a meeting with no clear purpose. Admit it: work can sometimes feel like a formidable opponent — the one thing standing between you and your action-packed weekends.

So today, we’re introducing the Levity Algorithm in Google Apps. Created in partnership with legendary improv comedians from Chicago’s Second City Communications, the Levity Algorithm is carefully tuned to help you spice up even the most boring of work days. Send happier emails, hold more engaging meetings, write more mind-blowing presentations — and above all, turn those frowns upside down.