Moving our enterprise mail to Google Apps

• Over 2500 business locations across more than 450 towns & cities

• Group caters to approximately a million customers.

• 15,000+ employees

• „Best Broker, India‟ by FinanceAsia

• „„Fastest Growing Equity Broking House - Large firms‟ by Dun & Bradstreet.

• IIFL Reseach rated „Best of the Web‟ by Forbes

• Mail is not a core function– But getting it wrong can be costly– Many users are not power users – basic facilities only

• Commercial mail systems costly – Per user license costs have to be kept under control– Resources required to run and manage 24x7– Capacity planning a major headache in a high-growth scenario

• Problems with existing email– Reliability of mail delivery– Repeated bottlenecks– Limited features

• Adding features is a long cycle of evaluation and integration

– Poor spam filtering– Poor webmail client leading to excessive use of bandwidth– Skepticism regarding implementation

• Lots of support hours wasted investigating if mail system is at fault

• Other issues– No shared calendar– No global contacts– No chat

On Premise Software

• Postfix-Horde combination– Free and lightweight

– Lots of free or cheap plugins

– Lots of features, but not out of box

– Hard to configure and manage

– Linux-based (we‟re a Windows shop)

– Spam/Antivirus extra

– Limited space

– Bandwidth hog

• Microsoft Exchange– Excellent on features

– Familiar client

– Already in our environment

– MS based (we‟re a Windows shop)

– Expensive

– Hard to provision and manage

– Spam/Antivirus extra

– Limited space

– Bandwidth hog

As a Service

• Datacenter Provider– Nearly free, server management fees

only, no per user charges

– No management headache

– Mail only, no advanced features

– Not core competency

– Constant capacity issues

• Local Mail Provider– Inexpensive

– No management headache

– Not used to our scale of operations

– Mail only, no advanced features

• Microsoft Exchange SAAS– Lots of features

– No management headache

– More space

– Mail only, no advanced features

– More expensive that other hosted options

• Positives– Gmail – familiar, easy-to-use web interface for most users

– No need to invest in, manage & support infrastructure

– Bulletproof implementation at scale

– Integrates well with MS Outlook and all other clients

– Great search, lots of space

– Shared calendar, chat, contacts

– Affordable – Low predictable TCOs

– Built in SPAM control (Postini)

• Considerations…– Security/Privacy – is the data safe?

– No control over infrastructure/availability

– Reduced ability to enforce custom security rules

– Limited Walled Gardens

Cloud

• Much simpler to maintain

• No capacity planning

• Ignore hardware, refresh

• Always updated

• Rapid implementation

• Shared infrastructure

• Harder to audit and control

• Less flexible

On-Premise

• Harder to maintain

• Capacity planning is a headache

• Plan hardware, refreshes

• Updates have to be planned

• Longer Implementation cycle

• Dedicated infrastructure

• Easy to audit and control

• More flexible

• Dual delivery on Jan 4– Mail delivered to both systems

• 100 users pilot

• All 11,000 existing users cutover on Feb 21– Now running smoothly for three quarters without outages

• Basic training to power users

• Dedicated resources for gmail Help desk

• “Excitement” events– Get people excited about the move

– Lower resistance to change

• Nearly users transitioned to Google Mail– A majority use the webmail interface

– A small minority (~5%) continue with Outlook

– One subsidiary continues to be on Exchange

– Mobile version is extensively used

– Themes is the most used feature of gmail

• Chat is popular

• Groups is heavily used. There are over 4,000 groups now– Users directly set up and manage small groups, larger groups managed centrally

– Much more feature-rich than simple mailing lists

– Very good for compliance

• Bandwidth usage has changed– Internet bandwidth use has gone up

– Internal (inter-branch) bandwidth use has gone down hugely

• Driven by move from Outlook to Webmail

• Less impact of the cc curse

– Overall, bandwidth costs have improved

• For us, branch bandwidth is costlier than Internet bandwidth

• Sites, Documents adoption is moderate– Some internal selling is required

• Local archiving, local rules of mails is now active– Team Computers provides the feed from gmail

• No service outages or delays on gmail in the last few quarters

Internal selling to employees a

must

Don’t confuse featuritis with

issues

SAAS is the best model for email

Question business on the

need for control

The move from communication to collaboration is not obvious