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Roche moving over 90,000 employees to Google Apps

Like many other businesses making the switch to Google Apps and other cloud-based solutions, The Roche Group suffered from "platform interoperability issues."
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

The Roche Group, a global corporation dedicated to research-focused and "personalized" healthcare, is making the switch to Google Apps in a very big way.

All of its employees (totaling more than 90,000) are being moved over to Google's cloud-based suite of productivity and collaborative applications, which includes Gmail, Google Docs and more.

Dr. Alan Hippe, both the chief financial officer and chief information officer of The Roche Group (and now guest blogger on the Official Google Enterprise Blog), explained his company's motivations for signing on to Google Apps.

Like many other businesses making the switch to Google Apps and other cloud-based solutions, Hippe lamented that Roche suffered from "platform interoperability issues" as it had two different email and calendaring platforms, which only became roadblocks to seamless collaboration.

Here's how Roche plans to make use of Google Apps going forward, according to the blog post.

The way our employees communicate and collaborate is diverse, and our employees are spread across over 140 countries. The integrated and socially-focused way that Google Apps enables collaboration is very compelling, and we expect this to not only bring our company closer together, but give us a strategic advantage. Additionally, being able to deploy Google Apps by simply enabling them via a control panel versus planning for and deploying complex infrastructure in our datacenters will help us focus on our core business -- helping save patients' lives

Employees will be able to access their email and documents from any web-enabled device, without using remote access systems such as VPN. This will make it easier for employees to work from home or on the go and it will reduce the strain on our IT support teams. Removing barriers to communication and innovation while enhancing mobile access is a key part of our Roche IT strategy.

The Roche Group is Google's second largest Apps customer to date. The top one is Spanish bank BBVA, which announced in January that it would be migrating 110,000 employees to the platform.

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