The Grill: Manesh Patel

It wasn’t broken, but he fixed it anyway. After launching an initial pilot, Manesh Patel, senior vice president and CIO at global contract manufacturer Sanmina-SCI Corp., ramped up quickly to move more than 16,000 users onto Google Apps for e-mail, calendaring and contacts — and he began turning off the company’s Microsoft Exchange infrastructure.

Patel estimates that by moving messaging into the cloud, he’s on track to save the business nearly $2 million annually in operating expenses. He explains how he did it.

Why did you move to Google Apps? We had done a lot of the traditional cost-reduction measures over the last several years. We felt that we needed to go after what I call the “high-hanging fruit” and consider structural cost reductions, so two years ago we looked at our messaging environment. Google Apps seemed to be a viable contender.

Were there other motivations besides cost savings? The cost piece was the primary factor and more immediate [benefit]. But there were two other factors. The second was to give ourselves flexibility and options moving forward. We want to leverage cloud-based technologies, [and] we thought messaging was the right place to start. Getting to that point where we attain that flexibility to me is a very strategic thing.

The third point was getting our employees to work more effectively together in teams across time and distance. We wanted an environment where these teams could go off and work together in one place that’s searchable and accessible without IT having to get involved. What we’re doing with Google Apps is leading us toward that. It’s not fully there — it may take another two or three years — but that’s the direction we’re going.

So, how did you get started? We started a research and development project with three or four people. That exercise went on for almost a year. In parallel we started to look at security and some of the other issues you get into with a cloud-based model. We came to the conclusion that this was a very viable technology and the capabilities were fairly comparable to what we were looking for.

Dossier

Name: Manesh Patel

Title: Senior vice president and CIO

Organization: Sanmina-SCI Corp.

Location: San Jose

Something people don’t know about him: “I studied aeronautical engineering at Manchester University in England. So I tell my kids I’m a rocket scientist.”

Favorite vice: “I don’t have time for vices these days.”

Hobby or pastime: “Watching English football — or soccer, as Americans like to call it.”

Favorite movies: Schindler’s List and Dr. Strangelove

Favorite book: Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron

Then we went into multiple pilot projects, followed by a global rollout over a period of about four months. We are now using Google Apps across 16,000 employees. We have a handful of Exchange servers and 100 or so employees left to convert. Those are our tougher employees that have specific requirements, and we’re still waiting for some gaps to be filled [such as the ability to delegate access to contacts]. We expect those to be closed out in the next two or three months.

What challenges does a cloud-based environment like Google Apps bring? One is to put in a support model that is more appropriate to a cloud solution. Changes come much more frequently. Figuring out a way to have a continuous conversation with our employees about what’s changing and making sure they get the most out of the situation, without being too intrusive — we’ve got to get creative there and make that work.

Secondly, we need to figure out how to roll out the additional Google Apps that we’re not fully utilizing today and start employees on the path to using those applications. For example, Google Docs and Google Sites and Google Video. Most of these are self-service, and employees have access to them. We just haven’t communicated to employees that they’re out there.

Is Google Apps replacing Microsoft Office? We still have Office. If you look at the feature set between Google Docs and Office, there’s still a fair gap. Google Docs provides some capabilities, such as real-time online sharing, but it wasn’t designed to replace Office. It certainly doesn’t have all the capabilities we need.

Not all of your corporate e-mail is outside your firewall.

Are you comfortable with the security Google provides? We use our single sign-on infrastructure to access Google Apps. We use SSL. We also looked at what Google is doing on the back end — their policies, procedures and practices. Frankly, Google has greater resources than we do. They’ve made some very significant investments in security [such as Google File System] that we couldn’t have done. In the long term, they’re going to be able to put in stronger measures than we can. So we’re very confident.

Google has had some well-publicized service outages in the past year.

Do you worry about availability? We’ve seen some impact, [but] overall we didn’t expect 100% uptime.

I think they’re learning some lessons about consumer-based vs. enterprise-based services. There’s less tolerance for downtime, especially for e-mail. Even though our internal solution was fairly redundant and we maintained close to 100% uptime, we had downtime from time to time.

How does an organization determine whether Google Apps is a good fit? For those who have a very standard environment, this is an option. The approach we took is the one we’d recommend: Go get three or four key folks who are out-of-the-box thinkers, who are open to new ideas and technologies, and go try it out. Part of that exercise is to validate, does this fit what I am doing? We spent almost a year doing this.

There are downsides to messing with people’s e-mail. Why take the risk? I’ve thought about this. There’s an old saying that necessity is the mother of invention, and in my mind we’ve changed that to “Necessity is the mother of innovation.” We’re in a low-cost environment. When you’re in that situation, you’re more likely to go try something that most other companies wouldn’t think about doing. I see that trend in other industries that have comparable challenges.