Living in the clouds: Is this the future of comms?

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

As business and the world around us continues to evolve and speed up we constantly need to adapt to our surroundings, more so now of course as companies across the globe cut back, trim budgets and get used to life in a long-term recession.

So what should they do? I’m sure if everyone knew the answer they’d have done it by now. But it only takes one and the rest will follow. The one in this case being global services firm Rentokill that is switching all its 35,000 employees in 50 countries from 180 different email domains and 40 mail systems to ‘cloud based email’ (email that sits within a virtual online server and that is managed by a cloud service provider such as Google or Yahoo) provider Google Apps by 2010 savings them millions in costs and at the same time encouraging all of its employees to use a far simpler, more integrated and collaborative set of tools with which I’m sure the majority are already familiar. We all know how to use Google effectively; we don’t all know how to use Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.

Google Apps is a service from our friends at Google that allows you to use custom domain names with several Google products featuring various Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, and Docs. The standard edition is free and offers the same amount of storage as regular Gmail accounts. The Premier Edition, which offers 25 GB of email storage, is around US$50 or $33 per year, per account.

This could well turn out to be an internal communication masterstroke both in terms of cost but also by bringing every employee closer together onto one system allowing them to share calendar information, chat live to one another, and have access to email translation and video.

Not only that the system will also provide email access to 20,000 regular PC users, as well as 15,000 on-the-road staff. The remote workers, who did not originally have a company email account, will now be able to access Google mail from any internet-connected device such as a PDA, iPhone or home computer.

Are any of the businesses you work for/with considering this or have they already switched over? Let me know either on email: james.bennett@melcrum.com, on Melcrum Communicators' network on Linked In that has 2,500 active users or tweet us on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you!