Johannesburg, 01 Jun 2023
Kenyan cloud services company and Digicloud Africa partner Altostratus Africa (AAL) is helping Kenyan businesses transform their operations and employee experience by migrating them to Google Workspace.
Digicloud Africa, Google's chosen reseller enablement partner in Africa, says African businesses of all sizes are realising unexpected benefits by moving to Google Workspace.
Gregory MacLennan, CEO of Digicloud Africa, says: “Our partner Altostratus is driving change for Kenyan companies by helping them change the way they work.”
Elseba Adewa, Partner & Chief Marketing Officer at Altostratus, says: “Kenya has long been a ‘Microsoft country’, but it’s a default rather than an actual choice. For many, it was a natural transition to move from their desktop environment to using Microsoft in the cloud.”
Kaari Mwilaria, Partner & Chief Revenue Officer at Altostratus, adds: “When many businesses move to a Microsoft cloud environment, there’s not much of a change in their work culture. They still tend to work in isolation, save multiple drafts of documents and e-mail attachments back and forth between each other. They bring their old habits to the cloud and don’t move to the new way of working.
“To remain relevant and compete, businesses need to change their culture and be in the cloud. Google makes it easy to change work culture once the organisations unlock its benefits,” she says.
Altostratus works to onboard businesses to Google Workspace and help them optimise the value of the move by showing them how to use the tools and features at their disposal.
Adewa says: “Google is simpler and opens a whole new world for them. One thing they find astonishing is that they can all share and work on the same document or spreadsheet. When we show them what’s possible, it recalibrates the way they think. Instead of paying for multiple tools from various vendors, they have everything they need in one place. Clients are loving the fact that it’s so secure and that they never have to lose data or work again. They also appreciate the centralised storage across the subscriptions from business to enterprise editions, which eliminates the need for any extra third-party storage or backup platforms. Those nine Google Workspace dots open a new universe for them.
“Another key benefit for many organisations – particularly those with teams in the field – is the offline capability that automatically syncs once they have access to WiFi and the reporting tool that allows field users to share real-time data from the field. Basically, real-time is transforming the businesses,” says Mwilaria.
MacLennan adds: “Since everything works with Office apps, users don’t even have to worry about converting or reformatting anything. Google asked a third-party firm (Quadrant Strategies) to conduct independent research to tease out non-technical differences between the Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. The firm’s findings revealed that companies that use Google Workspace are more likely to experience positive outcomes than comparable companies using Microsoft.”
He says a Google research report entitled Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 Impact on Business in March 2022 found that businesses that adopt Google Workspace are more likely to report greater productivity, innovation and increasing revenue than those that adopt Microsoft 365; and the more Google Workspace tools a user employs, the greater their preference for the solution. Collaboration is a key benefit, with 52% of survey respondents who use Google Workspace saying the communication platforms on Google facilitate meaningful conversations. Google Workspace users say they have an average of 13.4 collaborators per document and 56% say using Google Workspace allows them to quickly and easily get what they need from team members.
An IDC report on the Business Value of Google Workspace indicates that Google customers will realise benefits worth an annual average of $120 700 per 100 daily active Google Workspace users by providing a collaboration solution that matches the changing way that employees work, enabling employees to spend more time on value-added and innovative activities, enhancing digital experiences for employees and generating significant operational efficiencies.
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