Google Workspace

We are seeing huge interest and strong growth in Workspace because of three important things that we see changing the nature of work.

First of all, the people want digital tools to collaborate. Most products were written for the sort of professionals — some people call it the white-collar workforce —which were office workers. We work with (healthcare system) Ascension…and they have far more nurses and doctors than they have professional office workers, and those people today need collaboration tools. A nurse talking to a patient wants to consult a doctor. They have a smartphone, and they want a tool and a product for communication and collaboration that was optimized for that experience. So our product helps these…”first-line” workers to collaborate in new ways.

The second is, traditionally, tools were designed only for collaboration within the boundary of an organization. But now with digital taking over, many companies want to collaborate beyond the boundary of the organization. And when I say beyond the boundary of an organization, take (aerospace corporation) Airbus, a big client of ours. They want to collaborate not just (among) Airbus employees, but they want to collaborate with the vendors. They want to share their demand forecasts and supply requirements with all their suppliers. And they want a tool that will help them and a platform to share and collaborate in a secure way outside of their organization.

The third is we’re seeing a lot of interest in digitizing workplaces. For example, a...retail branch of a bank is a digital office — an office for the tellers who service clients. Now, many financial institutions are talking to us about using our collaboration platform, but as a vehicle to create a digital branch. It’s digitizing offices and workplaces that no longer can be just physical, but need also a digital representation. All three are driving growth of Workspace.

And lastly, because communication is so private, and lots of corporate data happens to be exchanged in a private fashion over email, for example, we’re seeing a lot of interest because of the security of Workspace. We have clients — whether it’s Nielsen that does audience analysis and shares data to help people be more targeted and marketing; whether it’s Netflix, which is using our collaboration tools to help their creators work together in a more effective way; whether that is financial institutions using us to communicate to clients in new ways; hospital systems — all of these need new collaboration platforms. And Google Workspace was designed for that new mode of communication working together.