Hudbay Minerals moves its global team to Google Apps

Posted by Joe AbiDaoud, CIO of Hudbay Minerals

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Joe AbiDaoud, CIO of Hudbay Minerals, a publicly traded Canadian mining company headquartered in Toronto. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 1927, Hudbay Minerals has focused on discovering and producing base and precious metals. From exploration projects in North and South America and our current operations in Canada, our 2,000 employees depend on technology to work together and make sure our efforts are coordinated across regions. To do this, we really needed a platform that allowed us to easily collaborate, work remotely using our mobile devices, and communicate across teams in different regions and different languages.

We had been using Microsoft® Office for years, with several Microsoft® Exchange servers across the company, but it became increasingly difficult for our IT team to stay up and running with the uptick in support calls due to a dated system. After exploring various options at different price points, we knew we wanted to move to a cloud-based solution to work more efficiently and provide a scalable and reliable solution.

We invited Google reseller, Sheepdog, to conduct a two-day Google Apps for Business workshop for a small group of employees from various levels and departments within the company. During the workshop, employees evaluated Google Apps against our “success criteria,” which included ease of use, efficiency, functionality, speed and cost. We quickly realized that Google Apps was a good fit for our geographically dispersed company and in July we started moving more than 1,000 employees to Google Apps.

Our IT support calls for email plummeted overnight, demonstrating just how easy it is to use Google Apps. For a global company, being able to instantly translate messages in Gmail and use Google+ Hangouts to meet “in person” made the language and geographical barriers easier to overcome. We’ve also estimated that by going Google we will reduce our costs over the long term when compared to the cost of upgrading and maintaining our old infrastructure. As a public company, we’re thrilled with the savings and new ways of working that we discovered by moving to the cloud.