Capgemini Picks Google Apps Over Microsoft

The $10.2 billion consulting and services giant recently finished its first enterprise deployment of Google Apps for 165 agents in an internal customer care and intelligence center in Junction City, Kans., and the executive in charge of the project said he'd like to see further deployment of Google's desktop suite.

Two months ago, Google said it planned to provide services to clients to support the adoption of Google Apps Premier Edition, which includes GoogleDocs, Gmail, Google Calander, GoogleTalk and Start Page. Now Capgemini, ranked No. 7 on the VARBusiness 500, is using it internally too.

"When we put up the new center, I was looking at every line item, including applications loads on a desktop for every agent. I knew of the [support] relationship between Capgemini and Google," said Robbie Brillhart, global practice lead for customer care and intelligence, at Capgemini.

Brillhart would not detail the cost of the project or how much money he saved using Google over Microsoft or other desktop suites, but he noted Capgemini paid the standard $50 per user for Google Apps and that the cost savings were only one of the benefits of the open-source suite.

"Ramping it up, one of the benefits we see out of this is the value from the collaborative use of how it is being used by the agent force today," Brillhart said. "There is ease of use and familiarity. It doesn't take much for an agent population to gain acceptance and embrace using it."

The agents use Google Apps to communicate via Gmail and crate reports and record data of customer interactions. This benefits customers because agents no longer have to end the call to find the answers and then call the customers back, according to Capgemini.

"They're more often using a CRM application, but they still need e-mail and documents to function inside the operations," Brillhart said. "Originally, the knowledge management team went a little crazy having another source going to for information. They wanted to keep that knowledge contained to one environment. But they were quickly converted. It fosters creativity."

Brillhart said he would recommend further deployment of Google Apps for further expansion or during technology refresh cycles at Capgemini, but stopped short of saying it could totally replace Microsoft.

"We stagger our licensing renewals, but when you start combining [cost savings] with the soft savings, it may accelerate that deployment," he said. "My division is customer care and intelligence. We take intelligence seriously, analyzing information truly doing business intelligence and data mining. That number crunching needs not only Microsoft apps but beyond Microsoft applications too. Can [Google Apps] be rolled out to an enterprise? The answer is yes, but it should be with qualifications that users need to be segmented. It does make sense, but you need to ask what type of user. I'd recommend it to after having used it myself."