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A leading British construction company switched 1,800 users over to Google Apps on May 2nd, becoming the largest
live deployment in the UK so far for Google’s enterprise applications suite. In
a phone interview this morning, Rob Ramsay, director of IT at Taylor Woodrow, firmly refuted the allegations reported here
yesterday that Google applications aren’t fit for enterprise use.

Since implementing the CRM SaaS solution, beginning
in 2005, Equifax has achieved a number of important benefits:

Productivity gains. The company estimates that the time needed to
complete sales forecasts has been reduced by 90%, with greater accuracy. And the
amount of management time necessary to gather and verify sales data has been
reduced by 50 person-hours per month.

Quick time-to-value. The initial rollout to 400 users was
completed in 60 days, compared with an estimated 12 months that would have been
required for installing an equivalent on-premise CRM solution.

Short payback period. The initial implementation of the solution
in Latin America showed a payback period of 10 months.

Incremental profits. Equifax sales and profits are growing
rapidly. Although not all of the growth can be attributed to the CRM solution,
the company believes that 5% of its year-over-year profit growth can be ascribed
to CRM due to internal productivity benefits.

High ROI. Equifax estimates that the ROI from its CRM SaaS solution is 350% annually.

“We had 10 types of [payroll] systems as a result of acquisitions. To get
basic information, it was nearly impossible,” he recalled. “Some did payroll
with [an outsource provider]. Some did it on their own. We had no visibility of
any of this information. Plus, we were paying a lot of money to [outsource
payroll].”

the

Despite those enormous expenditures, the performance is far short of official goals, and in some cases seems to be declining further. The average output of