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In 2005, LTech was a local systems integrator and development shop with a focus on Microsoft solutions. Satisfied with the Microsoft technology platform at the time but crowded out by a sea of competition and frustrated by a lack of innovation, we were introduced to Google through a Google Search Appliance integration for a customer.

We learned about Google Apps and started working with the platform in 2007 to provide deployment and migration services for clients. So when the Google Apps Reseller Program was announced in 2009, LTech already had an experienced team in place and a Single Sign-On product developed specifically for Google Apps customers.

The Microsoft Partner Program was and is a great program for developers in terms of providing SDKs and IDEs, but it was difficult to navigate and even more difficult for us to get support and build a true partnership. The Google Enterprise Program however, was easy to navigate and make connections. I am sure being early to the program helped, but Google gave us the support and confidence we needed to invest and build a successful reselling business. Google provided detailed training which allowed our technicians and developers to learn the platform and build out our delivery teams.

By mid-2008, we decided to stop actively offering Microsoft-based collaboration solutions to customers. This was a big move for us, and a bit scary, but the Microsoft platform wasn’t evolving at the pace our customers demanded. The Microsoft Partner Program didn’t foster the same type of opportunity as Google for a start-up company like ours. Our Google Apps business was taking off and we haven’t looked back. We have grown to a multi-million dollar business with dozens of cloud technologists and a national footprint, helping to pave the way for business adoption of cloud.

The Cloud Transition Opportunity
We are investing in the cloud because it is the future of business technology. This is one of those rare transitional moments in technology – near unlimited computing power is being made available to both experts and non-experts alike. Whole technology ecosystems and industries will be transformed by it. Just look at what leaders like Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have accomplished in a few short years – and the investments they've made.

Source: LTech 2010

At LTech, we’re seeing certain industries adopt Google Apps faster than others. We are responding to this by developing vertically focused solutions. For example, our Google Apps for Real Estate program bundles Google Apps, Agent Website Templates, and Tungle.me calendar sharing.

Why are these businesses adopting Google Apps? It’s widely known that Google Apps is more cost effective compared to on-premise software, our customers are also taking advantage of the rapid innovation pace for productivity gains and business transformation.

Google Apps isn't just email. Products like Google Sites and Google Docs can deliver spontaneous collaboration capabilities for employees that were never connected before. For example, the new Google Docs interface takes real time collaboration to the next level by allowing you to see other people’s changes character-by-character as they type. No need to send attachments back and forth, and it is web-standards and mobile friendly. That sort of innovation is key to enterprise adoption of cloud platforms.

The Google Apps Partner Program
While I can't reveal exact numbers, the positive growth of Google Apps sales in our business is exciting and keeping us charged up about the opportunity ahead as a leading Google Apps Reseller and Google Enterprise Partner.

Source: LTech 2010

The Google Authorized Reseller Program has helped us grow from a small systems integrator to a leader in cloud products and services. We've built a great relationship with Google that is mutually beneficial, and we get support when and where we need it. In particular, the Google Apps developer relations team at Google has been instrumental in helping us to build enterprise quality products like Power Panel for Google Apps and Single Sign On. The documentation and API support available is fantastic, and the community and ecosystem around the Google Apps suite is strong.

Ed Laczynski
Founder and CTO, LTech

Posted by Pat Spears, Google Apps Reseller Team
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Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

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Last week, on April 1, the same day that Google re-named itself "Topeka," the State Library of Kansas (SLK) decided to "go Google" and switch our agency's email to Google Apps. But, unlike Google, we weren't fooling around!

The State Library of Kansas provides on-site and online information services for state government, the Legislature, all Kansas libraries and Kansas residents. We also work closely with seven regional library systems geographically distributed throughout our state. We have a large collection of print and audiobooks, plus state and federal documents. We manage a suite of online resources available 24/7 to all Kansans – from databases and digital books to online tutoring and services for the visually impaired.

Google Apps will provide the library’s staff with Gmail, calendar, video chat, real-time document and video sharing, backups, and additional services such as archiving powered by Postini. It will, for the first time, allow the agency’s multiple locations to have a staff intranet using Google Sites and join together teams that were previously separated by several firewalls.

The State Library relies heavily on technology so this chance to modernize our communications and collaboration systems is a welcome one. We switched to Google Apps for many reasons:
  • Substantial cost savings
  • Hosting by a trusted third party
  • Archiving and backups happening continuously in the cloud
  • 99.9% uptime, guaranteed
  • Strong recommendations from staff at the Northeast Kansas Library System, which made the switch last year
Now SLK’s IT staff will be able to focus on internal staff training needs and upgrading all of our technology systems – rather than on server maintenance. As we deploy Google Apps in the coming weeks, we will first be training our management team who will then work 1-on-1 with all staff to ensure that questions are answered and staff are comfortable with the new products and services. A number of State Library staff already have Gmail accounts and are familiar with its functionality.

Staff members are also interested in Google Apps capabilities beyond Gmail – like Google Groups and Google Docs. Our staff is eager to take advantage of the capabilities of Google Apps!

Staff from SLK will be at the Kansas Library Association conference in Wichita beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, April 7, and encourage anyone interested in Google Apps to seek us out.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
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Beyond mail, Jeremy deployed Google's online documents, video, archiving, and encryption apps to help his 200+ research scientists and staff improve collaboration, boost productivity and enhance security.

Jeremy will be speaking this Thursday, April 8, on a live webcast. Register here.

Several years ago the situation at MRN could not have been more complex. The organization had grown with very little standardization and centralization. For email, we had a blend of email clients – Microsoft Outlook®, Outlook Express®, Apple® Mail, Pine, Elm, Semaphore, Morse – need I go on? There was such a proliferation of email accounts with varying reliability that people kept saying "Send it to my home account, because I never check this one." We also had growing needs in calendaring and document sharing.

We determined that we needed a single mail domain, mailing lists, a company directory, a shared calendar, as well as shared documents and project websites – something our employees weren't really aware of at the time. We thought about running Microsoft Exchange in-house, switching to another on-site platform, or a hosted model. Over a fair period of time, we calculated the costs of several solutions and analyzed all the reliability and collaboration factors.

Google won hands-down in a feature/cost comparison. We opted for a Big Bang conversion and got over the conversion hump in about a week's time. Import of email was flawless across 104 mailboxes – and we've now grown to nearly 300. We also did up-front preparation with weekly FAQ emails and bulk account creation in advance. We set up a hotline and printed instructions for users. We also conducted help sessions in the lobby. Post-migration, we provided "tip of the day" messages for 14 days.

Beyond mail, we deployed Google's online documents and video, as well as additional archiving and encryption features by Google Postini Services to help our 200+ research scientists and staff improve collaboration, boost productivity, and enhance security. Most of all, we learned that Google Apps provides capabilities far beyond our expectations and provides a platform for us to easily add on additional web apps. It's this additional extensibility and flexibility beyond just email that's a big value add for an organization of our size – and we're just scratching the surface.

We learned many tips and tricks for making users happy and we can share five (and more!) simple ways to get more out of Google Apps. Please join me for a live webcast to learn more.

Five Simple Ways To Get More Out of Google Apps
Thursday, April 8, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT
Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.

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Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team
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Mattson’s headquarters are in Fremont, California, but we have offices in Germany, Canada, Korea and Taiwan. Our IT staff supports 600 users with a wide variety of needs, from engineers/designers, to sales, manufacturing and customer support in India.

We wanted to put more power in users' hands and, as an IT team, get away from administering basic functions so we could focus on the business and run a leaner operation. For email, we had Microsoft Exchange and we calculated it was costing us $172 per user per year. The speed internationallywasn’t that great because our Exchange servers were in Germany and people had to have VPN access.

We compared Google Apps Premier Edition to messaging solutions from Microsoft (too expensive) and Cisco (also out of our price range). Migration is a distant memory because it was relatively easy and required only a day of training.

Google Apps was a pleasant surprise, if you think about what you get for $50 per user per year ($4.17/month). The security is great and, in addition to email and calendaring, it also provides us with an online knowledge database created using Google Sites. Previously, our engineers and other groups put resolution documents or published articles on network file shares. Today, they use Google Sites to create websites by product to host documents related to new engineering releases and engineering problem-solving documents. We use this information in the field to quickly diagnose issues.

We went from silos of knowledge to a transparent online community that allows everyone to share and contribute information. As another example, we built a site to collaborate on customer issues that features video chat and shared documents. Now we can address customer issues more quickly.

Google Apps has changed the way we do business – we’re even looking to extend ERP to the web. We turned off four servers and we’re communicating better than ever before. We’re more organized. We don’t lose emails, and we no longer spend time looking for them. Google translates everything for us in all the languages we operate in, which is huge. The biggest benefit is that our productivity has increased because we're collaborating a lot better.

Our CEO and CFO love Google Apps. In fact, the CEO sent us an email saying, “I'm so glad you're moving our company forward,” and our CFO tells me all the time how much he appreciates easy access to what he needs from wherever he’s traveling. As an IT person, I feel proud. We have bragging rights now because we’ve implemented something that helps us work together better – while at the same time cutting our capital expenditures.

I will be speaking on a live webcast on Thursday. I invite you to join us with your questions.

Saving 70% with Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange
Thursday, December 10, 2009
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT
(note that you will be directed to a third party registration page)

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.




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Delta boasts a diversified portfolio of 44 city center, airport and resort properties, and employs more than 7,000 people. The company is at the forefront of cloud computing, not only for email and collaboration, but also for building social networks that encourage employee collaboration.

Mike will be telling more about Delta's transition at a live webcast this Thursday, November 19, 2009, 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT.

At Delta Hotels and Resorts, we continually look for ways to enhance the relationships we have built with our guests, colleagues, and owners. As a people-centric organization, we have a vibrant colleague community which is empowered to deliver honest and genuine service on a daily basis. One of our technology goals is to provide innovative ways in which our employees can strengthen the Delta community.

Our talented and hard-working colleagues are, undoubtedly, the difference-maker for our brand. Collectively, the spirit, creativity and passion for service that personify our staff enables Delta Hotels and Resorts to rank as one of Canada's top employers and maintain one of the lowest employee turnover rates in the hotel industry. Within our culture, we affectionately comment that our colleagues have "Delta in their DNA."

To support our colleagues and optimize the way in which they work, our IT department develops ideas that improve collaboration and push the boundaries of technology. One recent implementation involved the wholesale replacement of a static and outdated Intranet platform with an engaging employee social networking site. The general idea was that our colleagues would embrace a user-generated content platform that truly permits information sharing across the hotel and the entire company. The results have been staggeringly successful! So much so that our IT team is now developing enhancements which are intended to take the platform to even greater heights.

Delta Hotels and Resorts decision to embrace Google Apps is another example of our commitment to improving collaboration and breaking down conventional technology bottlenecks. The pain points of conventional, on-premise solutions include desktop software licensing, private wide area networks, and never-ending storage requirements.

Conventional solutions are simply too expensive and too rigid to support progressive organizations such as Delta. From a cost perspective alone, the move to Google has cost us 75% less than a comparable on-premise messaging and calendaring solution.

While the switch to Google has created new opportunities for colleagues, it has also enabled IT to remove bottlenecks on technology processes and resources. Extensible storage, message archiving and built-in disaster recovery are three basic examples of situations where Delta Hotels and Resorts has saved significant sums of money by choosing a cloud-based solution to replace an on-site headache.

You can see more in our video, here:



To date, Delta Hotels and Resorts has provided Google Apps accounts to more than 4,000 colleagues across 44 hotels. One out of two staff has a Google Apps account and we're striving to improve that ratio. In order to reach staff who may not otherwise touch a computer on a day-to-day basis (e.g. doormen, housekeepers, banquet servers and others), we've deployed Apple iMacs across all employee cafeterias. In addition, we've developed programs which encourage our staff to connect from home computers, smartphones or any browser with an Internet connection.

We are proud of our decision to embrace the cloud and implement Google Apps. I am delighted to share some of the insights we’ve gained from our move and supporting a multilingual workforce, during a live webcast, "From Microsoft Exchange 2007 to Google Apps: The Delta Hotels and Resorts Story."

Join us for this LIVE Event on:

Thursday, November 19, 2009
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT
(please note that you will be registering on the webinar host's site)

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team



Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.
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