InternetNZ Goes Google to Benefit from Collaboration in the Cloud

Company Background

Headquartered in Wellington, NZ, Internet New Zealand Inc. (InternetNZ) is the non-profit open membership organisation dedicated to protecting and promoting the Internet in New Zealand. Internet NZ strives to foster a coordinated and cooperative approach to the Internet’s ongoing development. InternetNZ is the recognised delegated manager for the .nz country code top level domain. This delegation is from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a function managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). InternetNZ has less than a dozen employees and contractors, but has about 280 members across New Zealand.

Business Challenges

InternetNZ used an internally-hosted Postfix/Dovecot server that provided IMAP webmail to InternetNZ’s ten users. However, this began to cause problems, as many of InternetNZ’s employees frequently travel and work from remote locations, and thus had trouble accessing their mail when not in the office. Furthermore, because InternetNZ’s users did not have one uniform client software and were using a variety of client systems, scheduling appointments and coordinating calendars became troublesome.

“The system was a historical investment at small cost many years ago… the system itself did not cost much, but having someone look after it did,” said InternetNZ Chief Executive Vikram Kumar.

Inbox quotas were informally set and internal maintenance of the servers was eating up valuable time. Additionally, documents were stored locally, which was another impediment to collaboration, and hindered the mobility of InternetNZ users.

“The #1 driver in our decision to switch to Google Apps was the flexibility of remote access to email and calendar,” Kumar said. “The second was that in general, we wanted to start the process of outsourcing all of our IT requirements rather than having them run in-house. We would definitely rather have them run in the cloud.”

Solution

Kumar said the organisation decided to move to the cloud for increased collaboration and mobility, and said that InternetNZ chose Google Apps because the cloud platform offered the easiest transition into the cloud.

Cloud Sherpas migrated InternetNZ employees over one weekend, minimising productivity loss for a quick transition.

“I think all the employees were very keen to shift,” Kumar said. “However, we did face some questions from our members after making the shift. Some members are very passionate about open source and did not like the idea of the move to a proprietary platform.”

However, any negative sentiment was far outweighed by employees who were eager to make the switch, and InternetNZ decided to Go Google in less than three days.

“It was a really straight-forward decision,” Kumar said.

Though most employees were already familiar with Google Apps, InternetNZ offered training focused on maximising the advanced features made available in the Apps platform.
“The interface wasn’t new, but people learned to shift their minds from personal email to being able to do new things in the platform. For example, from deleting emails to archiving them and managing hierarchical folders to labels,” Kumar said.

All employees are using and enjoying the Google Apps web interface, as various client software programs were voluntarily discarded in favor of the web interface. This makes scheduling appointments and meetings much easier, Kumar said.

“People focus on the benefits and the costs are very small, so we were happy to make the shift to the cloud,” Kumar said. “We never went into it for money savings, though I think Google Apps is saving us money. The main driver for us was to have remote access and hosting our information in the cloud.”

Results

Kumar said that employees are more productive due to the collaboration benefits and anywhere access of Google Apps. Employees can work from the road, from home and even by phone, as Google Apps integrates well with many smart phones.

“Anywhere access is really important,” Kumar said. “Google Apps has definitely allowed people to work more flexibly off-site. There are even people who will take their work outside on a good Wellington day or head off to a café on the more usual windy days.”

While employees find they can more easily schedule meetings, retrieve Docs and even simply check e-mail, InternetNZ’s IT administrator finds that Google Apps has freed up some of his valuable time.

“Delegated administration makes it quite easy to set up a new end-user,” Kumar said. “That’s been something that’s been taken off the IT administrator.”

Though InternetNZ still maintains an on-site document management system and a few hosted applications, Kumar said that InternetNZ plans to move fully to the cloud over the next few years, as employees have been uncharacteristically silent after the switch to Google Apps.

“Oh believe me,” Kumar said, “If they weren’t absolutely happy, there would be a huge amount of noise. The shift to Google Apps has taken the regular complaints about email and scheduling appointments right off the team agenda.”