Promevo
Located in Dearborn, Michigan, Campbell Marketing & Communications pride themselves on being a one-stop, full service marketing solution.
Founded in 1982, Campbell focuses on web design, event coordination, social media campaigns and product training, with a particularly strong presence in the automotive industry. Campbell employs around 100 people throughout the many facets of their operation.
The Challenge
As Campbell moved into the digital age, they started off running Microsoft Exchange on their own servers. As the company grew larger they decided to outsource to a third-party provider and adopted Outlook as their email application.
However, this was costing $13 or $14 per month for each user. With approximately one hundred employees, that adds an additional $16,800 to his yearly operating expenses, just on the core cost of Exchange.
This did not factor in the peripheral costs of necessary services such as collaboration tools and intranet access, as well as anti-virus and anti-spam software. As Campbell continued to expand, these costs only became more substantial. Campbell was a company with enterprise appetites on a small company budget.
In 2008 and 2009, Campbell was looking for ways to cut costs without loss of productivity or scaling back the scope of their operations. It was at this time that Joe Vandervest, CIO and systems admin for Campbell, suggested the company move from Exchange to Google Apps. Joe and members of his IT team were already employing Google Apps for their personal use and saw the potential benefits for the company as a whole.
The Solution
Joe and his team demonstrated how Google Apps for Work would save Campbell both time and money over their existing IT solution.
They explained that Google Apps not only presented the opportunity to save thousands of dollars per year, but also showed how the organization and collaboration features of the Google Apps productivity suite gave them more flexibility and greater control than continuing to outsource for Exchange and Outlook.
Campbell soon transitioned to Google, and uses the Apps suite for a number of their operations. To highlight a few of their use cases, Docs has allowed for simple collaboration on documents that later become proposals and policies. Sheets is frequently used for activity logs, file conversations, and to push auto-updating graphics to Sites pages. Internal surveys and signups are handled through Forms, while Sites has provided a convenient way to maintain policies, records, and shared info.
As the company became invested in Google Apps, they saw the need for greater administrative control over their users and digital assets.
Due to their contracts in the automotive industry, Campbell needed to maintain high compliance and security standards. This need brought Joe into contact with Promevo and its managing partner, Aaron Gumz. Aaron had a solution in gPanel®, which provided Joe with the ability to manage and run reports on Campbell’s employees and data.
“That looked like the kind of enterprise management,” explains Joe, “that approached what I needed. We signed up with Aaron, we probably had about eighty, ninety users at the time, and we’ve been growing from there.”
Benefits
Joe estimates that over the past eight years of using Google Apps and gPanel®, Campbell Marketing & Communications has saved approximately $175,000.
Apart from the savings. Joe and his IT team have benefited from the transition away from installed software and traditional computing and information systems.
Without the issues caused by installing and updating traditional software, Campbell’s employees have enjoyed less lost productivity, and the built-in collaboration of the Google Apps suite has been a great benefit as well. Joe explained, “Google Apps for us provides a rarely found price-performance value.”
gPanel® has also helped Campbell simply and effectively manage their digital assets and maintain security standards. Furthermore, Promevo has been an important resource for the company as they continue to grow in their use of Google Apps.
“[Promevo’s] tech support side has always been great to work with. Fast, knowledgeable, efficient, and outcome-oriented.”
With the convenience and reliability of Google Apps, and Promevo’s support, Campbell Marketing & Communications has been able to find a solution that not only provides a great cost benefit, but also keeps up with the fast pace of today’s technological needs.
What Campbell wanted to do:
- Replace their expensive email service with a cost-effective and easy-to-manage solution
What Campbell did:
- Switched from Outlook to Google Apps and began using Google's Cloud-based apps to complement their existing systems
- Deployed gPanel® to better manage their digital assets
What Campbell accomplished:
- Saved an estimated $175,000 over the past 8 years of using Google Apps
- Maintained industry-mandated security and compliance standards simply and effectively through gPanel®
- Increased collaboration through various app uses
