Why Reed.co.uk opted for Google Apps instead of Microsoft Office 365

Director of technology Mark Ridley says licensing complexities encouraged Reed.co.uk to switch to Google Apps

Reed.co.uk, part of the recruitment agency Reed, wanted to move away from the IT delivered by Reed's central IT department and take care of its own IT needs.

As part of this transformation a large number of users moved from Windows PCs to Chromeboxes and Chromebooks. The company also moved away from Wyse thin clients and Lotus Notes, but instead of opting for Microsoft Office 365, Reed.co.uk switched to Google Apps instead.

According to director of technology Mark Ridley, the reason for dumping Office was the complexity of Microsoft's licensing model.

"We had done a lot of work with Microsoft over the years looking at SQL Server and Windows licensing and that's very difficult, especially for a small business. We relied on service providers to help us understand its licensing models," Ridley told Computing.

"Sometimes it's just a lot easier to say 'okay, we're going to pay £3 a month for email or for document editing' - the original Office 365 terms and conditions said you couldn't use Office 365 licences in a virtualised environment, but you could on hardware," he said.

For Reed.co.uk, this meant a huge shift in the way it perceived Office 365 as a viable product.

"It turned it from being incredibly compelling to not compelling at all - as we used desktop-as-a-service and that kind of 'gotcha' that was hidden in the licence terms makes it hard to use it," Ridley said.

The company used Google Apps instead and this "took a whole layer of complexity of Microsoft's licensing model out of the equation", Ridley said.

But Ridley insisted that Microsoft remains a key partner of Reed.co.uk and that much of the software that the organisation uses still comes from the software giant. "Microsoft is still a great partner of ours and there are certainly no plans on the horizon to move away from using SQL Server and ASP.NET," he said.

"We use Microsoft every day in the office and we use Microsoft servers in our live environment to run Reed.co.uk. We are still reliant on Microsoft for a lot of our technology; our finance guys still use Excel and Word. But our relationship has changed from where it was de facto to buy Microsoft and not consider anything else to Microsoft will be bought if they are the best in the market," he said.