Health care and pharmaceutical company Roche Group will standardize its
email and calendaring system on Google Apps for about 90,000 employees
worldwide, the companies announced on Thursday.
Roche has had two different email and calendaring platforms for the past
two and a half years, a situation that has created "interoperability
issues" that have harmed collaboration, according to a blog post from
Roche's CFO and CIO Dr. Alan Hippe.
Roche expects that the cloud-based model of Apps will improve collaboration
among employees as well as reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining
software and hardware on the company's premises.
"Employees will be able to access their email and documents from any
web-enabled device, without using remote access systems such as VPN. This will
make it easier for employees to work from home or on the go and it will reduce
the strain on our IT support teams," Hippe wrote.
The blog post doesn't say what other email and calendaring platform Roche
has been using. A Google spokesman said via email that neither Google nor Roche
are disclosing the platform that is being discarded.