M&C Saatchi switches from Google cloud to Egnyte for better Microsoft integration

Mobile division head opted for Google as a 'kneejerk reaction' because friend from Ocado said it was a good idea

A division of global advertising agency M&C Saatchi switched from Google's cloud infrastructure to Egnyte for better integration with Microsoft Excel and Exchange.

Alistair Roberts, head of IT at M&C Saatchi told delegates at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit 2014 that the firm's mobile advertising division started with four staff and now has 120 people worldwide. They operate using Microsoft Excel and Salesforce and a shared network drive.

"When they started to operate around the world, they very rapidly ran into a brick wall. They asked how they could get their network drive shared - which sounds unsophisticated but this was their business model," Roberts explained.

He said the firm looked very seriously at Google because it "has excellent cloud infrastructure" and it worked well but for this particular division it didn't integrate properly with standard Excel sheets and complex formulae.

Another problem Roberts alluded to was that implementing Google was a bit of a "kneejerk reaction", something that he said may have been necessary because of the need to quickly adapt to customer and business needs.

"In this case we had a CEO in this business division and he had a good friend in [e-commerce company] Ocado, who said this was a good idea," he said.

Roberts suggested that the mobile division was influenced by the case study, but he feared that it would not necessarily work for M&C Saatchi.

Roberts told the CEO of the mobile division that people would not like to shift away from Exchange and Outlook, but his fears were dispelled and Google was implemented, and training sessions were put in place.

"Each group had half a day at a time and the level of attendance was pathetic, they were complaining about not having Outlook. We kept them on for a 12-month cycle, and the only thing that kept them using Gmail was the giant mailbox because it was bigger than the space we had on Outlook before we moved to Outlook 365," Roberts explained.

"They didn't want to adapt or buy into this and the CEO of the division didn't move off Exchange and Outlook either," he added.

Roberts stated that some subsidiaries that used Google from day one did very well with the technology because it was engrained into the workforce. The firm's mobile division has since moved to Egnyte's hybrid cloud offering, while the rest of the company remained a Google customer.

"They get the advantage of high-speed access locally but it is dotted around the world so they can benefit with mobile phone ability to run an app, so it has improved collaboration across distances," he stated.

Roberts believes that although the Google implementation did not work within the mobile division, it showed that cloud services could be taken on, changed and dropped in a short space of time unlike in the past whereby companies may be stuck with a decision that didn't work out for five to ten years.