2^nd Wind Exercise is a specialty exercise equipment retailer with 89 locations and 325 employees.  Their Exchange 2003 infrastructure was 4.5 yrs old and at the end-of-life.  Agosto was brought in to assess the environment, email usage and collaboration workflow and make a recommendation on whether to upgrade Exchange or find another solution.  After a detailed analysis we determined that Google Apps was the best fit for 2^nd Wind to replace their Exchange infrastructure. 

You can find detailed reasons in the 2^nd Wind Google Apps Business Case.

The plan was to migrate users in a phased approach over a few months allowing for user training and a staged data migration.  However, 2^nd Wind’s Exchange servers had other plans.  After the third Exchange server crash in two weeks, we decided to cut everyone over to Google Apps as fast as possible.  At 4pm on Valentine’s Day we started the migration.   By 5pm we had all users provisioned and email functionality restored for all 325 users.  We then began the daunting task of migrating 75GB of Exchange data.  Due to bandwidth limitations the full migration from Exchange to Google Apps for 325 employees (and 75GB of their data) took 10 days.

Our post-migration survey showed that users loved the speed, ease of access and features of Google Apps over Outlook/Exchange.  According to user feedback, the top five Google Apps features are:

1. Google Sites

2. Google Docs and Spreadsheets

3. Ease of access

4. Virtually limitless storage

5. Google Calendar

Prior to Google Apps the Exchange server had crashed 3 times in 2 weeks resulting in days of downtime.  Following the Google Apps deployment, email hasn’t been down in 10 months.  More importantly, by converting to Google Apps we saved 2^nd Wind $146,947 doesn’t even include the cost avoidance of using Google Docs and Spreadsheets instead of Microsoft Office.

Google apps was a big win at 2nd Wind.  Agosto managed all aspects of the migration to Google Apps, from TCO analysis all the way through implementation.