How Google Apps helped Jaguar Land Rover keep motoring after Ford sale

Following its sale by parent company Ford last year, car maker Jaguar Land Rover has had to face the thorny problem of cutting itself loose from Ford's web of business applications.

JLR is spending £200m separating its IT operations from Ford, largely on carrying out the painstaking process of copying and cloning more than 1,600 business applications.

The work - which followed its sale to Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors - has ended up "costing an awful lot of money and not adding any business value overall", according to JLR CIO Jeremy Vincent.

"We are now in the final straight. It has been very tough and the whole company have worked extremely hard.

"In the next three to six months, we will be free to pursue our own destiny and to take our own decisions," he said.

Before being free to pursue its own destiny, JLR has to extract 18TB of email from Ford's Microsoft Exchange system.

CIO of Jaguar Land Rover Jeremy Vincent is a recent convert to cloud computing
(Photo credit: Jaguar Land Rover)

"When faced with cloning an entire Microsoft Exchange environment across the whole enterprise, I thought - here was a golden opportunity to do something different," Vincent said.

For Vincent, doing something different meant making the decision to migrate 14,500 staff worldwide from Microsoft Outlook to Google Mail and Calendar, part of the search giant's Google Apps suite.

The move has saved Jaguar Land Rover several million pounds compared to the cost of setting up its own Microsoft Exchange server and will offer ongoing service savings as well.

However, Vincent said that getting the old messages into Google Mail had proved "complex", something Google hopes to address with the release of new tools for migrating data from Microsoft Exchange this financial quarter.

Staff will get access to Google Mail within the next four months and in future Vincent is...