As an organisation that delivers end-to-end ICT solutions to its customers, it is important for the Jasco Group to leverage technology to improve its own efficiencies, enhance performance, heighten competitiveness and cut costs.
Jasco turned to Grove Group, a premier Google Apps partner, to assist them to move to Google Apps for Work across the organisation.
Although recently implemented, Jasco is already realising significant savings on software licences, desktop devices, backups and archiving, plus significantly reduced data centre and support costs.
“It’s true that change is the only constant and it’s important for businesses to keep abreast of change to avoid becoming irrelevant in today’s business world. As a smart technology and solutions partner known for delivering converged ICT offerings for carriers and enterprises across the telecoms, communications, IT infrastructure, security and fire sectors, it made strategic sense for us to adopt leading technology and integrate this into our portfolio,” says Paul Fick, chief technology officer for Jasco Group, Enterprise.
Moving into the future
“We chose Google as our solution suite as it offers us the flexibility and affordability that has become the norm today. For example, with a 12-month licensing cycle, we have the ability to scale up or down, and given the weakness of our currency, the much lower dollar cost was very attractive. Our decision simply makes good business sense,” Fick notes.
Aside from the attraction of massive savings, Jasco decided to move to a cloud-based solution instead of expanding internal data centres and back-end systems for internal operations. Furthermore, it will provide Jasco with the opportunity to showcase Google Apps’ capabilities and benefits in a real, working environment.
“As many of our people use Google Apps every day in their personal lives, the move is a natural progression that requires no specific architecture or hardware to implement. Across the organisation we are now using Google Sheets and Docs to collaborate on projects and tasks. We’ll be using Google Slides in our boardrooms and leveraging off the fact that, for whatever we need, there’s a Google app available,” Fick explains.
Denis Fry, director of cloud and operations at Grove Group, shares his insights on the partnership with Jasco: “It is always exciting to work with companies that have a passion for technology, that want to work in the ‘now’ and not in the ‘then’ era. Jasco is certainly such an organisation.
“The biggest challenge that we faced in executing the implementation project was the urgency with which the new service had to be delivered. The required services had to be deployed to all Jasco’s users in all its locations internationally in under eight weeks.
“The combined team, consisting of Jasco’s IT team and Grove’s experienced resources in various locations, deployed the required services within the given timelines, meeting their tight deadline.”
Empowering the organisation
The deployment included on-site management and training yet the learning curve was not steep, as most people are familiar with the Google Mail interface from personal experience.
Jasco reported that people were excited about going the Google route once they realised that they would have access to data and the applications from anywhere. Employees are now able to collaborate on web-based documents in their browsers, and can make changes that other authorised users can see in real-time.
By having data in the cloud, email attachment round-trips are eliminated and this reduces frustrations for teams who need to work together efficiently.
“From an IT perspective, we’ll be able to spend more time innovating, and less time keeping the lights on and the software and hardware updated. As Google launches new features, users will automatically get these improvements when the browser is refreshed,” adds Fick.
Mobile applications are also updated in the background, which is a distinct benefit for us as with traditional technology and ‘software plus services’, client software can hinder innovation. Once back-end systems can support new features, even then users don’t benefit from new functionality in those environments until the software on their computers and mobile phones have been upgraded, which can be a labour intensive exercise.
“We also look forward to faster collaboration and greater cooperation across teams and offices,” Fick says.