We foresaw a new way of working in the cloud and introduced G Suite, a suite of apps for safe, user-friendly business collaboration and productivity, more than a decade ago. While the importance of cloud-based collaboration was always apparent, it is of paramount significance now.
Google Meet, G Suite’s video conferencing solution, has helped millions of people stay in touch over the past few weeks. This includes remote workers, companies livestreaming to global employees, doctors caring for patients, banks providing loans, retailers and restaurants assisting the elderly in placing orders for home delivery or curbside pickup, social services conducting welfare checks, governments serving citizens, and schools staying in session.
We hit a new benchmark this week: every day, more than 2 million people use Google Meet, and together they spend more than 2 billion minutes in meetings, which is more than 3,800 years. We recognise the enormous responsibility that comes with this expansion and are committed to maintaining our previous level of service.
In Case You Needed Clarification, Here It Is.
Meet, along with the rest of G Suite, is hosted by Google’s worldwide, high-availability, and highly-available cloud computing platform. This allows us to efficiently and dependably manage our capacity and maintain service availability. The same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in security, and global network that Google uses to secure your information and ensure your privacy are available to companies around the world with Meet. Our Google Meet security blog post has more details.
All G Suite and G Suite for Education users get free access to Google Meet’s high-end video conferencing features as of last month. Through guarantee continued support for enterprises, organisations, institutions, and educators throughout this period, we have extended this availability to September 30, 2020.
G Suite has reached yet another major milestone this year, with more than six million paying businesses and organisations using the service. We recognise the importance of supporting these groups as they care for their own clients, patients, students, and consumers during the epidemic. This is a small selection of the tales they’ve told us.
For their staff’s convenience, Cambridge Health Alliance, which serves Cambridge, Somerville, and the Boston Metro North area, has adopted G Suite. The system serves 140,000 patients. When dealing with a pandemic, where constant contact with our CHA employees was of paramount significance, “we didn’t know how vital G Suite has become to our everyday work,” stated James LaPlante, Sr. Director, Technology and Biomedical Services. “Staff have been able to connect from their Gmail, Calendar, or Meet-enabled conference rooms in any of the three hospitals, fifteen health clinics, or from home with a single click.”
Hackney Council’s 4,000 employees in the United Kingdom stay in touch and provide crucial services to residents thanks to the use of Google Apps for Work (G Suite), Google Hangouts (G Suite Meet), and Chromebooks.
Despite the nationwide quarantine in Peru, the Judiciary has been able to keep operating thanks to Meet. Both internal meetings and hearings are being held via video conferencing. Because of this, lawyers, judges, and court clerks can continue to conduct their jobs without risking exposure to the virus.
Since July 2019, the entire business of Korean Air has been using G Suite, which has greatly improved productivity and morale. G Suite facilitates efficient communication between employees across many channels (chat, voice, and video), which in turn speeds up the decision-making process. Korean Air has a brand new “Google G Suite Meeting Room” to boost its cloud-native communication and mobile-based collaboration.
In 2018, German manufacturer KAESER Compressors chose G Suite, allowing them to quickly and without disruption shift its 4,000 workers to working from home. They’re communicating with clients and potential employees using G Suite.
Milenio Televisión, a Mexican television cable news channel, had to figure out how to keep their show on the air when their news anchor voluntarily self-quarantined after fearing he had come into contact with a person with COVID-19 during a conference. They opted for Meet due to its reliability, privacy, and crisp audio and video. Meet has become an integral part of Milenio Televisión’s workflow, and the network has begun airing several shows live on the platform and doing video conferences with foreign journalists.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Italy, the Credem (Credito Emiliano S.p.A.) bank depended on G Suite, particularly Drive, Docs, and Meet, to assist its employees work together remotely and recover from the disruption. They are able to rely on Meet to keep holding one-on-one meetings with customers, which is great for company continuity.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is in charge of IT strategy and development in the Philippines. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has been working hard to enhance its programmes and services for confined workers and people. This includes implementing G Suite-based tools like GovMail, Google Chat, and Google Meet.
Remote government operations have benefited greatly from the transition to cloud-based GovMail that began last year. According to Emmanuel Rey Caintic, the DICT Assistant Secretary for Digital Philippines, “coordination between government departments is more coordinated, resulting in faster replies that benefit their citizens.”
The German cleaning product manufacturer Kärcher had planned to implement G Suite for Business company-wide by 2021. As a direct result of the epidemic, Kärcher hastened their rollout by distributing G Suite to all 14,000 of their employees in just five days. Since the beginning of April, Kärcher’s weekly active Meet and Chat users have increased by a factor of 20.
For internal team collaboration, Salesforce, which provides a customer relationship management solution, adopted Google Apps for Work. According to Andy White, VP of Platform Engineering at Salesforce, “with workers working from home with COVID-19, new technologies like Meet are increasingly more crucial for efficient virtual collaboration.
” Despite having 50,000 daily video conversations (2x our normal volume), our teams are always able to stay in constant contact because to Google Cloud’s scalability and support.
Shopify, a frontrunner in the e-commerce industry, uses Meet to maintain its employees in constant contact with one another. According to Garth Pyper, Director of Technical Infrastructure, “even with the demand surges observed around the world, we just had a 20 person meeting webcast to 4,000 people and there were no issues.” “At Shopify, our 5,000 employees rely on Google Meet as their primary video conferencing solution because of the safety, dependability, and adaptability it offers.”
Xero, a cloud-based accounting software business, has adopted G Suite to facilitate its shift to a totally remote workforce in time for COVID-19. “Google Meet is crucial in keeping our teams socially engaged, and Docs, Gmail and the whole G Suite family of tools has the team’s productivity and collaboration working as if we were in the office. Since implementing G Suite, our IT department has been freed up to tackle additional issues that arise from having a remote workforce.”
The largest grocery chain in Singapore, NTUC Fairprice Co-Operative, has seen a jump of 400%+ in capacity needs as customers frantically stock up on basics in preparation for COVID-19, both in-store and online. NTUC was able to meet the additional demand after adopting G Suite and allowing the great majority of its staff to work from home.
Schnucks is a family-owned grocery chain with locations in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and it operates a hundred stores across those states. For the convenience of our corporate and retail staffs, we are now running a round-the-clock Helpdesk on Google Meet. Since our transportation team uses a Google Meet ‘hotline’ as the WFH dispatch platform, we can all benefit from the social distance that this technology provides.”
TELUS International, a provider of customer experience solutions for worldwide companies, has relied on Meet as its primary collaboration platform for quite some time. While moving from an on-site staff to a remote work paradigm, “The Meet platform has helped us maintain and develop our caring culture,” stated Michael Ringman, CIO.
Our team’s ability to consistently communicate ‘face-to-face’ with Google Meet has been critical to keeping us motivated despite the distance between us, whether through real-time collaboration, live meetings, or a little stress release with some virtual happy hours.
Some of the many tales we’ve heard include the following. We’ll keep helping everyone stay online in the cloud. Find out how Google Cloud helps businesses and neighbourhoods by reading more here.
