Posted by Franck Hémont, IPSEN

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Franck Hémont, Group Informatics Engineering & Development Director at Ipsen, who is leading the company’s project to deploy Google Apps. Ipsen (Euronext: IPN, ADR: IPSEY), is a global specialty-driven pharmaceutical company.
See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

IPSEN is a truly global company, with over 4,500 employees spread across almost 50 countries. We work collaboratively across borders and teams, and with a recently implemented restructure it has become even more important to allow the organisation to work together seamlessly.

It was these challenges we had in mind when we evaluated our messaging and collaboration tools earlier this year. When we met with Google, we were looking for a secure, efficient and innovative solution that would allow the IT organization to focus primarily on value creation and the business to more effectively work together.

We’ve been gradually migrating to Google Apps for Business since September this year, after a successful six-month pilot phase. It involved 180 users spread across divisions such as R&D, Purchasing, HR, Manufacturing and across numerous locations in Spain, China, France, United States and United Kingdom. The pilot has allowed us to evaluate how the solution will work in our organization, and how it will bring value to the company.

Revevol, a Google Apps implementation partner, assisted us for the deployment, both for the technical integration and change management.

We’ve been impressed by the sophistication of cloud computing and by the additional functionality Google Apps will bring to our business. The ability to collaborate within a 100% web environment will be invaluable, especially for our researchers spread over distant sites in France and the U.S.

With Google Apps, our employees will be able to access their working environment from anywhere, at any time and from any device, bringing major organizational benefits and allowing our teams to work more effectively together.

100% web applications have many advantages over legacy and single tenant hosted technologies. There’s no need to wait years for the next big software release or manage a complex set of installers, software patches, and hardware upgrades. With Google Apps, new features are available with a simple refresh of the web browser.

We want to make it easier for customers to stay up-to-date with what’s new. On Thursday March 31 at 10am PST, I’ll be hosting a recap where you’ll hear about new applications like Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office and powerful new features like Google Apps Scripts support in Google Apps, Smart Labels, updated Contact Manager and the ability to sign outgoing messages with DKIM. I’ll also review the updated Google Apps feature release process which enables IT admins more granular control of the roll-out / deployment of updates.

For nearly real-time information on updates to Google Apps, administrators and users can follow along through RSS, email alerts or Twitter. If you’d like a refresher on previous quarters’ developments, you’re welcome to watch the replays on YouTube.

I hope you can join me. Register to attend the live webinar on March 31 at 10am PST.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

The benefits of Google Apps and cloud computing extend beyond just business communication and productivity. Today there are a growing number of cloud applications for virtually every aspect of your business through the Google Apps Marketplace. Hundreds of vendors now offer products and services through the Marketplace that integrate directly with Google Apps for business. So what do you need to start going 100% web, and what does it really take to simplify everything from messaging and collaboration to real-time financial dashboards and analytics with cloud computing?

Register for this live and interactive webcast on Wednesday, March 30 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern with Google Apps Partner Lead Scott McMullan and NetSuite Director of Business Development Dan Chang. You’ll hear about business use cases, return on investment (ROI), and other considerations for moving to the cloud with NetSuite and Google Apps.

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Enterprise Marketing Team

Customers are switching from legacy systems to Google Apps at an astounding rate. In 2010, our customers migrated over 3.5 billion emails, over 100 million calendar events and 25 million contacts. Over 6 million (and growing) emails are migrated to Google Apps every day!

To help make it easy for our customers to make the switch we’ve made several improvements and updates. Our data migration tools for Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft Outlook® now support several additional IMAP servers, including Novell® GroupWise, Cyrus®, Dovecot® and Courier®. Customers like Premier Access Insurance – a network of 10,000 dentists in California and other locations throughout the United States ‐ have used our migration tools to make the switch to Google Apps.

Join William Woodson of Premier Access Insurance and me on a live webinar on Thursday, March 24th at 10am PST where William will share his experience and perspectives in planning and managing the migration process, as well as lessons learned. You can also hear more about new updates and improvements to our tools and best practices in planning a migration.

If you are planning a switch, this webinar can't be missed. Register today!

Posted by Aditya Kulkarni, Product Manager, Google Enterprise

This year cloud computing went mainstream, and the conversations moved beyond "this is a way to cut costs" to "this is a better way to run my business." While many IT vendors have now adopted (or co-opted) the term “cloud computing” to describe a wide variety of technologies, most don’t deliver on the true promise of the cloud. Hosting single-tenant server products in a data center is not cloud computing. Nor is requiring customers to install thick client software. These solutions lock-in customers to multi-year release cycles, leave them with the significant costs of managing client software, and expose sensitive data on insecure devices. In 2011, we are committed to moving beyond the current notion of cloud computing to bring customers to a world we call 100% web.

100% web
In a 100% web world, business applications are delivered over the Internet and accessed in a web browser. The applications and the data are stored centrally and are designed to be served from a highly scalable, secure and reliable multi-tenant infrastructure. Devices like notebooks, tablets, and smartphones are portals to the data that help people be productive from anywhere, at any time. Upgrades aren’t necessary to get access to the latest innovation, just refresh the browser. Businesses no longer own or manage servers and client software: they purchase integrated applications and development platforms from others, and now devote their valuable time to business logic and features that create competitive advantage.

We are investing in a variety of technologies so that companies can be productive with nothing but the web:

• Google Apps is the world’s most popular suite of web-based communication and collaboration applications, and includes email, instant messaging, calendaring, documents, sites, video sharing, Postini services and dozens more. We will continue to improve and expand our offerings to bring more powerful technologies to our more than three million customers.
• Google App Engine lets companies build their own applications for internal or external use and host them on Google infrastructure. This allows for faster and easier development, virtually no ongoing maintenance, and the ability to easily scale to meet capacity needs at short notice. App Engine already sees more than 1 billion page views per day from more than 150,000 active applications, and we will be launching App Engine for Business more broadly in 2011.
• Google Apps Marketplace provides the other applications customers need to build their business on the web, integrated with Google Apps and installed in a few clicks. The marketplace will continue to grow beyond its 250 applications and make it easier for businesses to find, evaluate, and purchase the best non-Google applications on the web.
• Android is one of the fastest growing mobile platforms in the world and designed to drive innovation and choice. Companies can now manage Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and other ActiveSync devices right from the browser. And the Android team is hard at work on a new version of the platform that addresses the unique aspects of tablet form factors and use cases.
• Google Chrome is an open source web browser developed to provide users with a fast, simple, and secure web-browsing experience with modern web applications. Chrome has become 300% faster in just two years, and adoption has tripled over the last year. This week we announced new features for Chrome to make managing enterprise deployments easy. Also, companies using older versions of Internet Explorer for their legacy applications can use Google Chrome Frame to access modern web apps that rely on technologies like HTML5.
• Google Chrome OS is a new operating system designed from the ground up for 100% web. By building an operating system that is essentially a browser, we can make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure. Last Tuesday, we announced the Chrome notebook Pilot program (apply to pilot) and Chrome devices for business will be available for purchase in 2011.

While many companies are able to jump right to 100% web, we understand that other larger businesses have substantial investments in legacy technology. So we’re also investing in solutions that bridge existing technologies to the world of 100% web:

• Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office allows people to continue to use the familiar Office interface (including Office 2003, 2007, and 2010), while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy. It will be available soon.
• Google Message Continuity is a very cost-effective form of disaster recovery that lets Microsoft Exchange customers leverage the reliability of Gmail to back up their servers.

100% web is a dramatic shift from how companies have traditionally purchased, deployed, and managed IT. But the more we talk with customers the more we realize that this is the change they’ve been waiting for. It is the ultimate extension of the cloud computing model, and it brings substantial benefits for companies that no other IT model can provide in terms of simplicity, cost, security, flexibility, and pace of innovation. If 2010 was the year of the cloud, 2011 looks to be the year of nothing but the web.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise