G Suite has had it best year yet in 2018 and has grown its revenue with 150% in the last 12 months. That’s because some very large enterprises like Airbus have signed G Suite contracts, but mainly because the adoption of Google’s collaboration suite in the Small & Medium Business (SMB) space has completely taken off. Since Belgium has tons of companies in the small & medium businesses sector, I thought it would be interesting to learn more about why SMB companies, those with 1 – 1000 employees, are going for G Suite.
At Google Next ’19 in San Francisco I spoke to multiple Googlers specialised in this space and attended a couple of sessions focused around this topic. I think the findings about why they choose for G Suite are very interesting and wanted to share those with you in this post.
G Suite is a complete suite of applications
Some SMB players have grown their headcount over the years and have adopted a range of technologies that seemed best for them. That’s why they end up with a variety of different applications like Dropbox, Zoom, WeTransfer, Microsoft Office, Gmail, Slack, … All sorts of applications that cost money and don’t work well together.
The great thing about G Suite is that it is a suite of applications that cover most collaboration and communications needs and work extremely well together. By adopting G Suite, the SMB company can become more productive and save cost at the same time because only one of the above solutions can be almost as expensive as the entire G Suite.
Becoming more efficient with G Suite
Another reason why SMBs are going G Suite is because it can help them become more efficient, in several ways:
Get work done faster
All companies have to move fast. Definitely SMB players, because they mainly have to compete with large enterprises. Being agile and innovative is key for them to be able to win. G Suite helps companies getting stuff done faster in two main ways:
- The embedded artificial intelligence in every G Suite application allows employees to get stuff done faster than ever before.
- The real-time and native collaboration capabilities allow people to finalise content (documents, spreadsheets and presentations) in a much more efficient way than it was the case when they were still sending attachments back and forth.
Make applications work better together
G Suite works really well together with other Cloud solutions that help companies work in a more efficient way. Examples are SAP, CRM tools, e-signature tools, and more. Next to the existing integrations, G Suite is also very open and integratable if you have to create an integration that doesn’t exist yet.
Work from anywhere, with anyone, on any device
G Suite is a cloud native application which allows people to easily work from home or other remote locations. No need for VPN or other cumbersome tools. Working from home also doesn’t mean that you are not available for meetings or harder to collaborate with, because G Suite’s video conferencing capabilities are very strong. Its real-time collaboration capabilities make it seem you are always sitting next to your colleagues.
Security
Pro-active and intelligent protection
Scale is very important if you’re talking about security. Since Gmail and Chrome have above 1 billion active users every day, Google has a very big advantage: it filters 10 million malicious emails per minute and protects 3 billion devices from malicious websites every day. This scale in combination with deep machine learning capabilities has made Google the most secure Cloud provider.
The security center of G Suite is like a digital security officer that proactively warns you about threads and gives you recommendations on the actions you need to take to keep your business secure.
Simplified security
G Suite is also the most secure because it’s completely Cloud-based. Knowing that one company is being hit by ransomware every 40 seconds, being Cloud-based is a very important aspect to keep your business secure.
Being Cloud-based also gives the advantage that the office suite is really easy to manage. It also opens up the capability of using Chrome Enterprise, which has seen a 250% uptake last year.
Equipped for the toughest standards
G Suite has all certifications a business needs to be compliant. Check out more information on this webpage.
Growth
Acquire and retain talent
New joiners expect to have innovative and flexible tools in their workplace because they are used to working with those tools at home and at school. G Suite for Education is used by 100 million students around the world and is growing rapidly every year.
It’s proven that if the tools slow young talent down, they will use so-called “shadow IT” or move to another company.
Next to that, Google also introduced Google Hire, which is an applicant tracking application allowing you to effectively track applicants throughout the recruiting process. Google Hire is completely integrated with G Suite, making the recruiter’s job much more efficient.
Scale seamlessly
G Suite is very easy to set up and manage. It requires no maintenance and allows you to grow at the pace you are growing, without any hassle.
Acquire more customers
Not directly related to G Suite, but Google is a very good partner in helping you to grow your business through My Business, Google Ads, DoubleClick, Cloud for marketing and all the other advertising products.
G Suite vs. competing products
G Suite has significant strengths in comparison with other office suites, video conferencing and content management solutions. Let’s take a look at how they differ and which advantages G Suite has to offer SMB businesses.
G Suite’s strengths within office suites
- Cloud native: G Suite was built for the cloud and has strong integrations across products
- Collaboration: Real-time collaboration in G Suite is more intuitive and fluid
- Management: There is no infrastructure to maintain or version compatibility to manage
G Suite’s strengths within video conferencing landscape
- Price: Competing products like Zoom have limited freemium models and their paid models are rather expensive
- Simple management and deployment: Hangouts Meet is included in G Suite and is also browser based, which means there is no installation required
- Ease-of-use: Hangouts Meet and Chat are very easy to use and integrated within the entire G Suite stack
- Reliability: 99.9% SLA for Hangouts Meet and Chat
G Suite’s strengths within content management tools
- Intelligent: Google Drive has tons of artificial intelligence features which propose the right document at the right time, allowing you to save time for more productive work
- Search: Google Drive’s search capability is very strong, allowing you to find the document you are looking for in a matter of seconds
- More powerful: Other content management platforms are more limited in terms of file sizes and upload speeds, making it harder to scale
No-brainer
In short, these are the reasons why small and medium sized businesses choose for G Suite that we talked about in this post:
- you only need one suite of applications, that are highly integrated
- your work, and that of your employees, becomes more efficient
- you don’t need to worry about security
- the collaboration suite sparks growth of your business
- significant strengths of G Suite over competing office suites, video conferencing & content management tools
For us, that seems like a no-brainer.
Want to know more? Join the webinar on Thursday 25/4 to compare G Suite with Microsoft Office 365!
Or check out this G Suite page to learn more.
