Google Apps is part of the furniture

Furniture company talks up benefits of Google's free software

Smart Furniture credits Google Calendar alone for increasing efficiency exponentially

Google claims that Google Apps, its suite of web-based office tools, can help small businesses with limited budget and resources move their business forward.

On the company’s Official Blog, Google Apps and Enterprise director Tom Oliveri invited one of its business users, Smart Furniture, to catalogue how the introduction of Google Apps has helped improve the business.

Tennessee-based Smart Furniture was founded in 1998 and uses a new business model called design on demand, which allows furniture and interiors for homes and offices to be customised for the user, by the user, via the web.

Stephen Culp, founder and chairman of Smart Furniture, explained that the firm had limited time and money for technology and tried unsuccessfully to scale up its operation using “standard” infrastructure and Microsoft Exchange.

“Then, in 2008, we discovered Google Apps,” he said. “We liked the general virtues of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that were inherent in Google Apps, and the fact that the applications improved over time without any effort from our team."

Culp described the collaborative benefits as “game-changing”. He said the major advantage that Google Apps brought to the team was that it freed up resources so they could focus on the actual business.

The furniture company credits a single app, Google Calendar, for increasing its efficiency exponentially. Culp said that it was very straightforward to use and allowed all staff to look at the same calendars, create new ones for events, projects or work groups, and share them.

He added that there are also other collaboration benefits, admitting that before the firm began using Google Apps, it would constantly lose information when staff changed roles or moved on.

Smart Furniture claims that Google Apps has helped get it on track for growth of more than 100 per cent in 2010 and that customer satisfaction rates are at record levels.