Spanish bank BBVA adopts Google Apps
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Web giant wins contract to provide 110,000 employees with hosted productivity and collaboration apps
Spanish banking giant BBVA has signed to agreement to adopt cloud-based productivity and collaboration suite Google Apps across its entire organisation.
The bank will initially migrate 35,000 employees to the application suite, which includes email, word processing and spreadsheets, instant messaging and calendars. By the end of 2012, it will have moved all 110,000 employees in 26 countries across.
The press release describes the implementation as the "largest global agreement to adopt Google Apps".
BBVA's CIO José Olalla said that it chose the Google Apps suite in order to "transform its business".
"Integrating the ... suite with our own tools will allow us to introduce a new way of working where employees have access to all the information they need with just one click, no matter where they are, and can reap the benefits of using advanced collaboration tools," Ollala said in a statement.
The Spanish bank is the latest in a steady trickle of enterprise organisations to announce their adoption of Google Apps. In November last year, it was reported that quintessential corporation General Motors was close to adopting the software.
Not every Google Apps roll-out has gone without hitch, however. In October, the City of Los Angeles revealed that its deployment of the system is still not complete after two years, as Google and implementation partner CSC have been "meet the security requirement of the Los Angeles Police Department".
In 2010, US university UC Davis rejected Google's hosted email offering following a short pilot on privacy grounds.
This is a watershed moment for the Cloud, not just for security, but equally importantly for a clear message that the migration is a move based on value - not on price. You can see that BBVA's IT department and Executive management concluded that security was not an issue, and that the top-line would benefit in their drive to differentiate themselves within their own market. I've expanded on these thoughts here for further reading: http://www.xuropa.com/blog/2012/01/11/the-cloud-for-value-and-not-price/
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