Cloud Sherpas shifts Salmat from Office to Google Apps

Australian marketing outsourcer Salmat will switch hundreds of staff from Microsoft Office to Google Apps for Work and roll out Chromebooks.

The Cloud Sherpas deployment will go live on Monday, after a couple of hundred staff spent several months using the product.

Salmat has 4,000 staff, and aims to have staff that aren't in contact centres moved across to Google by Christmas. It will then look at extending Google Apps for Work to its contact centres.

Which versions of Office will be replaced hasn’t been disclosed, though Salmat chief executive officer Craig Dower said the company wasn’t using Office 365.

“It wasn’t a decision about which was a better tool in and of itself today – they are both terrific,” Dower told CRN.

As a former managing director of Microsoft-Accenture joint venture Avanade in Australia, Dower said he knows and "loves" the Office 365 platform.

But with various media and marketing clients using or adopting Google, he said it was a longterm strategic decision to go the same way.

“It seemed to us there was an ecosystem opportunity there that would be tighter in the longterm with Google than Microsoft,” he said.

Salmat is also rolling out Chromebooks, which will go first to mobile sales people and the leadership group. Dower is also interested to see how Chromebooks might work in a contact centre.

“The cost of acquiring and management compared to any other device is massively different. We’re keen to explore that,” he told CRN.

Google recently made Apps free for Microsoft EA customers.