The Erith Group saves business data – and £38,000 per year – with Google Apps Premier Edition
Business
The Erith Group has over four decades of leadership in the construction industry, specialising in demolition, asbestos removal, remediation, waste recycling and haulage. With a network of o ces across the country and an impressive client list, this privately owned family business is experiencing rapid growth as a result of its commitment to delivering exceptional quality of service and client satisfaction.
The company boasts an annual turnover in excess of 40 million, employs a workforce of over 200 skilled professionals and, in 2007, was named by The Sunday Times as one of the best small businesses to work for in the UK.
Challenge
Like so many medium sized businesses, IT manager Paul Driscoll has sole responsibility for every piece of the Erith Group’s technology jigsaw – from the desktop, through data storage and security, to managing an increasingly complex communications environment.
As a rapidly expanding company, where employees often work remotely, the Erith Group needed a secure, reliable and ?exible IT infrastructure able to scale to meet its needs. “Systems management was becoming a complex, time-consuming and expensive problem. We are in the business of demolition, not information technology, so keeping things simple is a major priority,” commented Driscoll.
But nothing could prepare Driscoll for what happened one night in September 2006 when a catastrophic ?re razed the company’s headquarters to the ground – taking all internal communications and IT systems with it.
“Seeing the incredible bene?t of the hosted Google Apps suite, it wasn’t long before I had boardroom approval to turn the trial into a commercial roll-out.”
—Paul Driscoll, IT Manager
Solution
Even before events of that night, Driscoll had been investigating solutions that would eliminate complexity from his IT. An enthusiastic personal user of Gmail since 2004, he saw an opportunity two years on to extend Google into the business, streamlining his systems and freeing up time to do more than simply “keep the IT lights on.”
But before he could complete his deployment strategy, the impact of the ?re took centre stage.
However comprehensive your disaster recovery strategy, the sight of a charred and smouldering server room is the stu of nightmares for an IT professional. “Despite the back-up working correctly, such a catastrophic incident cannot fail to have a major impact on the business. My job was to minimise this impact and
get the systems running again,” recalls Paul.
“Fortunately, we had been in a process of trialling Google Apps Premier Edition prior to the ?re. Almost half of our senior executives had migrated to the hosted software so we were able to access email, calendar and document applications as normal from laptops and home PCs with an internet connection. This meant
we could conduct ‘business as usual’ while I recovered the wider systems. Seeing this incredible bene?t of the hosted Google Apps suite, it wasn’t long before I had boardroom approval to turn the trial into a commercial roll-out right across the organisation.”.
Results
Since implementation, the Erith Group has seen a signi?cant reduction in the cost of its IT. The email storage capacity for the company has increased dramatically without additional cost, allowing the business to plan growth for the future.
Economics aside, Google has enabled the Erith Group to deliver very signi?cant improvements in working practices. Employees can now access their work from any location with Internet access, and work together on presentation and document creation thanks to the collaborative features of the software. Google Docs allows employees to simultaneously create, access and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations without multiple versions having to be saved. This allows teams to work on projects together, irrespective of their geographic location, while avoiding the time consuming process of emailing documents back and forth and keeping track of the different versions.
The Erith Group executives now have an incredibly ?exible communications environment, allowing new business prospects, clients and employees across disparate o ces to virtually meet and participate remotely in presentations, while its engineers can record large demolition projects by uploading photography to Google’s centralised Picasa Web Album.
“To achieve the same level of functionality I currently have with Google Apps, the business would have had to allocate an additional budget of £38,000 per year – and we still would not have seen the productivity bene?ts delivered by improvements in working practices,” concludes Driscoll.
