Google and Spanish financial services company Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) announced today that BBVA is now using Google Apps, in what is reportedly Google’s biggest enterprise contract to date (at least based on number of users), though the terms are unknown.
BBVA has 110,000 employees in 30 countries. That’s a lot of people that will now be using Google Apps for work.
In a guest post on the Google Enterprise blog, BBVA CIO José Olalla writes:
At BBVA we see technology as a key sustainable competitive advantage, and staying at the forefront of technology and business practices is key to our success. Today we’ve announced that we’re migrating our business to Google Apps to increase efficiency and to help our teams to collaborate more easily, regardless of location.
We were looking for a technology that would transform our business operations – not just make our workers more efficient. Integrating the Google Apps for Business suite with our own tools will allow us to introduce a new way of working where employees have access to all the information they need with just one click, no matter where they are or what kind of device they use, and can reap the benefits of using advanced collaboration tools.
We will migrate our old email systems to the cloud with Gmail. Google Talk, Google Sites and Google Docs will allow our teams to communicate and share ideas more easily – working in a way that they have never experienced before.
With Google Docs, for example, we’re excited about the real-time collaboration benefits – and we expect to increase productivity by removing the need to constantly update different versions of a document. We are developing our new global intranet (we call it High Performance Desktop) taking advantage of Google’s collaboration tools, changing it from a corporate communications and process management site to a place where all employees will be able to share, contribute and manage knowledge globally.
Initially, only 35,000 BBVA employees will be on Google Apps, but the company intends to have it rolled out to 110,000 by the end of the year.