This $1.26 billion company made a big bet on Google over Microsoft for 10,000 employees four years ago, and it never looked back

Advertisement
This $1.26 billion company made a big bet on Google over Microsoft for 10,000 employees four years ago, and it never looked back

Fossil Q Hybrid Smartwatches

Fossil

Fossil makes smartwatches like these - among many other fashion accessories.

Advertisement
  • Fossil, a $1.26 billion fashion house, chose Google G Suite over Microsoft Office 365 about 4 years ago - and never looked back.
  • A top IT exec at Fossil says that its interface was more familiar to the company's mostly-younger workforce, and that it lets them spend less of their time managing servers.
  • Fossil has had such a positive experience with G Suite, in fact, that it plans on moving at least some of its databases to Google Cloud.

Nowadays, fashion house Fossil has bet big on G Suite, Google's productivity suite, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, and more, specifically for business customers. All 10,000 of its office workers - two-thirds of its global workforce, if you include retail stores - are all-in on G Suite, with plans to extend into the Google Cloud, too.

Fossil's big Google move has its roots about four years ago, when the $1.26 billion publicly-traded company had to make a big decision.

Complimentary Tech Event
Transform talent with learning that works
Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

Its enterprise agreement (EA) with Microsoft was almost up. Fossil's IT department knew that it wanted to go to the cloud, so that the company would no longer have to operate its own email servers. That left Fossil with two options, says Fossil VP of IT Infrastructure Jørgen Scheuer-Larsen: Renew its EA with Microsoft and go to Office 365, or take a chance and move the company to its upstart competitor, Google's G Suite.

A three-month pilot program of both showed something surprising, says Scheuer-Larsen: Only 3% of Fossil's 15,000 or so employees actually used Microsoft PowerPoint, and 2% used Excel. That undercut most arguments that Fossil needed Microsoft Office, specifically, in order for employees to do their jobs. And, because 70% of Fossil's workforce was under 30 at the time, says Scheuer-Larsen, Google was a familiar and easy interface for most employees.

Advertisement

Further, Scheuer-Larsen found that Google's G Suite was much further along the technology curve than his team originally thought - especially given that G Suite has a certain reputation as being better for smaller companies than those of Fossil's larger size.

"It's obvious that the technology level was much more advanced on the Google side, much more mature, much more edgy," says Scheuer-Larsen.

Google Diane Greene

Google

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene

Within 100 days of ending the pilot program, Fossil finished taking Office out for most employees, and putting G Suite in. That's faster than you usually see with traditional, boxed software, says Scheuer-Larsen, who saw the speed as a benefit of cloud-based software delivered via a web browser.

Four years later, the move has meant much lower overhead for Fossil: Where before, the company managed 47 Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers, they're now down to one, for the stragglers not yet on G Suite. Without the need to manage that many servers, the IT team has been able to shrink its email team from 15 people down to three.

Advertisement

"This changed our world completely," says Scheuer-Larsen.

Without the need for "eyes on glass," with staff constantly monitoring for server outages and other problems, the team has been more free to pursue new projects and other "really cool stuff."

As for users, Scheuer-Larsen decided to give the power to the people. Rather than host formal trainings, the team instead found a few "champions" who were really jazzed about the change to Google, and gave them the title of "Google Guides."

Those Guides were empowered to throw regular G Suite-themed mixers, where they could answer their colleagues' G Suite questions, directly. Because this training came from their coworkers, and not IT, users asked more questions and retained more of the answers, says Scheuer-Larsen.

"That was actually pretty smart," says Scheuer-Larsen.

Advertisement

Another, underrated reason why the company liked it, says Scheuer-Larsen: A common headache at Fossil with Microsoft Office was keeping everyone on the same versions - if one team was using an older version of Microsoft Word than another team, incompatibilities could arise. G Suite only has one version, accessed from the browser, and everyone has the exact same apps.

"We were giving everyone in the company the same tool kit," says Scheuer-Larsen. "From day one, everyone was based on the same technology."

As for the cool stuff that the IT team can now get up to: Scheuer-Larsen says that the company found recent announcements of a cloud partnership between Google and SAP to be "extremely interesting."

Fossil operates SAP databases from its own data centers, but is in the process of moving some of those to Google Cloud - the positive experience with G Suite made Fossil more willing to choose Google over Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, says Scheuer-Larsen. In the long-term, Scheuer-Larsen sees Fossil as focusing more on fashion than IT infrastructure, and this is a key part of that move.

"We're not interested in the data center business," says Scheuer-Larsen.

Advertisement

Next week, Google will unveil the next steps for both G Suite and Google Cloud at its annual Google Cloud Next conference, so stay tuned.

Get the latest Google stock price here.

{{}}