blog Fascinating news arrives from the Australian today that packaging company Visy has ditched its existing Microsoft email platform and migrated to Google Apps. The newspaper reports:
“Packaging giant Visy will migrate about 5,000 users to Google Apps, the internet giant’s productivity suite, as it replaces Microsoft enterprise-wide.”
There aren’t any direct quotes from Visy in the piece, and it appears to have been sourced on the sidelines of Salesforce.com’s giant Dreamforce conference in the US over the weekend. There is a strong collaboration going on right now in the enterprise between Salesforce.com and Google, as they don’t substantially compete, but do offer complementary software as a service products.
In addition, I haven’t been able to get in contact with anyone from Visy today for further information.
But what really interests me about the fact that Visy has chosen Google for its collaboration suite is the question of why the company didn’t go with Telstra’s version of Microsoft’s Office 365 offering instead.
Seasoned Australian cloud-watchers will remember that Visy was one of the first organisations to sign up to Telstra’s infrastructure as a service cloud offering back in mid-2009. Given Visy doesn’t appear to be worried about hosting its email in an offshore cloud, and taking into account the fact that it was already using Exchange in-house, one wonders why the company didn’t simply bolt on the Telstra Office 365 offering and be done with it.
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