Google is often bragging about the new companies who have adopted their Google Apps platform. The process of sharing the story of companies who made the switch to the cloud gives both sides numerous advantages. Google gets some great promotional materials, the possibility for an enterprise-to-enterprise “word of mouth” reputation, and they secure the loyalty of the company who just vouched for them; it’s hard to turn on someone you just said you loved. Meanwhile, the company who does the promotion has information on their site published on major Google information outlets, which is a great boon when it comes to visibility. Normally, however, these promotion-based discussions aren’t worth talking about too much. The most recent case,DirectSki.com, is worth mentioning.
As should be evident, DirectSki is a site for skiers, but more specifically is a travel planning site for ski vacations. That means that Google is treading on Bing’s territory; while both Google and Bing have travel features, Bing Travel has been one of the few areas where Bing really thrived. To have a vacation planning company hop over to Google’s territory, especially when Microsoft is pushing their own cloud-based productivity suite (in both the current BPOS and the upcoming Office 365 lineup), must be painful.
Ronan Hughes, the CTO of DirectSki, indicated that they evaluated several options before going with Google, but that Google Apps offered several advantages. The primary advantages, states Hughes, were:
- Lowering overall costs.
- Reducing necessary IT hours.
- Having access to “cutting-edge functionality” in Google Apps.
- Reducing the amount of training required.
- Having access from all five of their offices.
DirectSki.com is an established company based in Dublin, Ireland. It has been around for over ten years and has more than 30 employees in five locations. You can watch a video interview with Ronan Hughes here.
[via the Google Enterprise Blog]
