Today, we’re announcing that we’re working with AT&T to establish Messages by Google as the default messaging application for all AT&T customers in the United States using Android phones. The collaboration aims to help accelerate the industry toward global Rich Communication Services (RCS) coverage and interoperability to offer a consistent, secure, and enhanced messaging experience for all Android users around the world.

“Many AT&T customers have enjoyed the advantages of RCS for years when texting with friends and family,” said David Christopher, executive vice president and general manager – AT&T Mobility. “We look forward to working closely with Google to extend these benefits to even more of our customers as they enjoy richer conversations with others around the world.”

Working together, AT&T and Google will continue the momentum to upgrade SMS with enhanced messaging features offered in Messages, which includes the support of chat features based on the open RCS standard. With Messages as the default messaging application, all AT&T customers using Android devices will get enhanced features so they can:

• Share full-resolution pictures from a recent event or vacation 
• Send a higher-quality video of that soccer goal and the celebration that followed
• Know when someone is replying to a text
• Send and receive messages over Wi-Fi or data
• Participate in group chats where it’s easy to add someone else to the conversation, or let someone leave, without starting a brand new thread

In addition to these features, we’re also rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one RCS conversations between people using Messages and people who have chat features enabled.

For years, we’ve been working with the mobile industry and device makers to bring enhanced and secure messaging to everyone on Android. Today’s announcement—that AT&T customers using Android devices will soon be able to enjoy these features by default—is a major step forward.

About Usha Martin

Founded more than 50 years ago and headquartered in Kolkata, India, Usha Martin is a leading steel and wire rope manufacturer. The company’s products are used in sectors such as oil and gas, aerial haulage, and general engineering.

Industries: Manufacturing

Location: India

Usha Martin operates several wire and rope manufacturing plants in India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In 1974, Usha Martin established an integrated alloy steel plant in Jamshedpur, India.

The business operates a range of joint ventures internationally, including a partnership with Joh Pengg AG of Austria to produce oil-tempered wire for the automotive industry and a venture with TESAC of Japan to manufacture and sell specialized wire rope.

Usha Martin’s ICT strategy had traditionally been highly localized, with independent IT infrastructures in all the manufacturing plants and businesses globally. These infrastructures were not integrated, leading to extensive duplication of effort and activities across the business.

In 2016, Usha Martin corporate started a project to integrate ICT across the business and establish centralized financial and technology controls.

“We established a program to integrate our communications infrastructure, security policies, and software licenses and implement a centralized enterprise resource planning system across our business,” says Jayanta Bhowmik, SVP-IT and CIO, Usha Martin. This program is being initiated primarily in Usha Martin’s Indian businesses before being extended to international markets.

In parallel with these initiatives, Usha Martin decided to consolidate the disparate email infrastructures and systems used by its corporate team, plants, and business units.

“We faced security threats and control problems managing and interconnecting all our very different email systems,” Bhowmik says.

“For example, we experienced on average about three to four ransomware attacks every year. We decided there was no alternative but to deploy a centralized email system.”

Usha Martin weighed its options and went so far as to purchase a license to run a single email system on its in-house infrastructure. However, the challenges of migrating a 4,000-strong workforce from up to seven existing email systems to an in-house platform proved difficult to overcome.

“We would have had to plan for server infrastructure, backups, security, and disaster recovery and execute smoothly, which would have been a time-consuming, expensive exercise,” Bhowmik says. “We estimated an in-house deployment would take seven to eight months to complete.”

“We looked at cloud-based services and Google presented a unique opportunity for us to consolidate our email without having to plan for our own infrastructure and worry about project planning, architectures, and deployment,” Bhowmik says.

“We also considered another service, but realized Google also gave us the opportunity to move our personal productivity applications to G Suite.”

A competitive evaluation regarding hosting and disaster recovery confirmed Usha Martin’s positive impressions. Google technology and processes in these areas outstripped the capabilities of the company’s own data centers.

“Google came up with a migration timeline and process that met our needs, with an expert partner to ease the transition,” Bhowmik says. “This was extremely important as the change represented a paradigm shift for a business that is very traditional and conservative.”

The Google partner worked closely with the internal Usha Martin team to complete phase one of the migration to the senior executive team. The partner also undertook training and worked with the IT team to hold meetings at various plants and locations to explain the changes. In addition, the partner conducted a skills transfer exercise to enable Usha Martin team members to complete the remaining phases of the project.

The business migrated the 1,500 team members in its Indian operations, as well as those in its Austrian joint venture, to the new platform.

“Using Google gives us wonderful alternatives to traditional systems,” Bhowmik says. “For example, using Google Hangouts Meet for video calls means we can reduce the number of video conferences that occupy large rooms and help ensure there are enough time-slots to meet demand.”

Improved Security of Information and Systems

One of the key differences between Usha Martin’s existing email systems and Gmail is the improvement in security and online safety.

“We had an anti-spam engine but, despite this, our employees received a lot of spam emails and messages carrying ransomware viruses,” Bhowmik says.

“With G Suite, we don’t receive these messages anymore and we minimize the risk of our network being compromised by malicious infections that could prevent us from accessing our files.”

Using G Suite has reduced team members’ use of USB drives to share large files that would otherwise be blocked due to email attachment limits.

“In addition, people are reducing the practice of printing documents for meetings. One person in each meeting can now steer and control documents, reducing duplication and the possibility of errors.”

“Document sharing is now happening much more in the cloud rather than through external media, improving control and security,” Bhowmik says.

Manage Calendars More Effectively

G Suite now enables Usha Martin team members to manage their calendars more effectively and share documents with multiple people without having to aggregate feedback or manage version control.

“Thanks to G Suite, our people are coming into a world of collaboration and modernization,” Bhowmik says.

Google Cloud Results

• Replaced conflicting, time-consuming paper logs with a near real-time, transparent app
• Scaled rapidly and easily to accommodate new teams thanks to Google App Engine
• Enables photographic and video communication to replace confusing text
• New factory solution rolled out in just 15 days

In 1877, Pietro Barilla set up a small bakery to make pasta and baked goods for the people of Parma, Italy. Today, Barilla applies its 140 years of baking knowledge on a global scale, with six major manufacturing sites in Italy and an international network employing over 8,000 people. As the world’s leading producer of pasta, Barilla knows that when it comes to making quality food, great communication is key. That’s why the company plans to become a completely digital, looking to technology to improve the way it works.

Teams at the Barilla factory in Cremona work along a production line more than one-kilometer long, staffed by three shifts of workers a day. When one shift handed over to the next or requested machine maintenance teams, they used paper notebooks and unofficial instant messaging to communicate. That meant there was no authoritative, real-time record of events, communication was messy, oversight was poor, and teams had to hold daily morning meetings to synchronise notes.

Barilla worked with the Google Cloud Partner Injenia to create a solution, beginning with a consultative process on the factory floor.

“We had the idea to to start from the bottom and work up,” says Cristiano Boscato at Injenia. “Barilla’s top staff were brilliant about letting us do it. Eight of us from Injenia spent months on the factory lines with Barilla workers, collecting ideas on Google Docs, making presentations with Slides and collecting feedback with Forms. The CollaborAction app we created is the result of an amazing partnership.”

Co-designing a team social network

“Everything at the Cremona plant was managed offline, with paper,” explains Alessandra Ardrizzoia, Digital Engagement Senior Manager at Barilla. “Workers on the line would track events in notebooks, the shift leader would have another notebook, and the leader of the maintenance team would have yet another notebook. Everybody wrote their own text description of events, so there would be mismatches in the information going around.”

To resolve this, teams would meet at 8:30am every day to reconstruct a consistent narrative. In addition, machine maintenance workers were already using instant messaging to communicate with the line. Barilla and Injenia looked for a solution that could deliver a searchable, single version of events, with the ease of use of a mobile messaging application.

After consulting factory workers for ideas, Injenia created CollaborAction, a custom-built app that brought G Suite collaboration tools together on an Google App Engine platform, using Google Cloud SQL to index files. Google+, Google Drive and Hangouts were not only highly available and easy-to-use, they also “helped with fast adoption, with interfaces that workers could already relate to.” Meanwhile Google App Engine enabled the Injenia team to deliver updates and new versions at speed, as part of a feedback process with workers who offered suggestions through a link to Forms embedded in the app.

Google+ provides an intuitive social media dashboard that workers felt comfortable with. Now teams use company tablets placed at intervals along the line to log in, report issues to other teams, photograph problems, schedule maintenance, give status updates through Hangouts chat, and have visibility on the whole process as it takes place.

“Everyone in the Cremona plant was really happy with the new social collaboration process. Because they were involved in designing the solution, they felt involved and really engaged with the process,” says Alessandra. “And now that everyone is aligned with CollaborAction, all the work in the plant is more effective. They are more agile and can use their time in more added-value activities.”

Optimization and a national roll-out

Created in Cremona, now CollaborAction connects over 1,000 users in six of Barilla’s factories in Italy. “The pilot at Cremona took one month, and adoption has been easier and faster in every plant we’ve taken it to,” says Cristiano. “We have another five or six plants more, and it takes no more than 15 days to introduce. That’s incredible.”

Because CollaborAction is a mobile app built on Google App Engine, scaling to meet new demand has been simple. Now maintenance teams use the app on smartphones, line workers use it on tablets, and shift leaders use it on laptops, so the entire team is aligned in close to real-time on a single version of events. And now teams communicate with video and photographs as well as text, there’s less room for confusion, as Alessandra explains. “It’s no problem understanding what’s happening in a video or picture, compared to a message that just says ‘something is going wrong.’ On a production line, where one part leads into the next, that speed makes a difference, and means we don’t have to throw as much food away when something breaks down.”

“Now we’re collecting feedback from all of the plants using CollaborAction and using it to create a standardised solution that we can apply across all of our plants,” says Alessandra. “We’re side-by-side with the workers in that sense, trying to address their needs with new features. It’s a way to make the workers feel like part of the solution, and that the app represents their needs and their voice.”

Solving a universal problem

By the end of 2018, Barilla and Injenia aim to have deployed CollaborAction to 2,700 employees at 18 factories worldwide. Barilla has already collected more than 50,000 posts with the app, including around 20,000 photographs and videos, and is now considering ways to apply Cloud Machine Learning Engine to create a maintenance chatbot or direct IoT connection with machinery.

“CollaborAction hasn’t just made our maintenance processes faster and more efficient, its also exponentially increased the knowledge and understanding employees have about their work,” says Alessandra. “It’s improving team spirit, too, such as when employees use CollaborAction to arrange to play soccer. It’s become the main communication tool for the entire plant.”

Deliveroo is the fastest-growing technology company in the United Kingdom, and the first-ever to win Deloitte’s UK Technology Fast 50 two years in a row. Founded in 2013, the food courier service achieved a three-year growth rate of over 15,000% to 2018, expanding beyond its London base to operate in 14 countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, from Spain to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

“G Suite products work really well, with no steep learning curve. As a fast-growing company, our strategy is to go to G Suite tools first to find immediate, effective answers within one integrated solution.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

The company runs multiple offices in each of its 14 markets, manned by more than 2,500 full-time staff. “Around 2016, we made a clear decision,” says Asif Akmal, Director of IT at Deliveroo. “As the company was scaling, we needed a strategy for all our offices to scale with us, and we needed the right infrastructure to do that. We can’t afford to have downtime, or to have tools that confuse staff, rather than help them.”

Together with Google Cloud Premier Partner Netpremacy, Deliveroo created a strategy around G Suite that emphasizes the speed and efficiency the company needs to set up offices and train new staff.

“G Suite products work really well, with no steep learning curve,” says Asif. “As a fast-growing company, our strategy is to go to G Suite tools first to find immediate, effective answers within one integrated solution.”

Putting videoconferencing at the core of the business

Videoconferencing is central to the Deliveroo business model. “Many of our international offices rely on operational staff from headquarters, whether for daily one-to-ones or group meetings,” says Asif. “Some of our engineers are constantly present in remote offices on a permanent live video stream, with a screen at the desk where there would be a chair. That makes it mission critical for us to have the correct infrastructure in place in order to do videoconferencing.”

Because internet connectivity can be inconsistent at new offices, Deliveroo teams occasionally need to be able to dial into videoconferencing over the phone, as well as connect through the internet. Previously, Deliveroo used a separate videoconferencing solution in order to have this feature. Now, as G Suite Enterprise users, Deliveroo employees can use Hangouts Meet for the same dial-in functionality, higher quality reception, and up to 100 participants on each call.

“Videoconferencing is crucial. And with Hangouts Meet we can have just one AV person in the whole business setting up and overseeing the infrastructure in 14 countries.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

“It was a simple decision to switch to Hangouts Meet,” says Asif. “It came with the enterprise package that we were already on, so we made a substantial cost savings by stopping the other solution, which cost almost £15 a month per user. Financially, that made it a no-brainer, but Hangouts also works better from a technical and integration perspective.”

“One of the first things that we address as a company moving into a new office is: Where do we get the videoconferencing system in place so we can start doing calls straight away?” says Elliott Shafii, Google Technology Engineer at Deliveroo. That’s why Deliveroo has a blueprint for video conferencing rooms, specifying the equipment required and the size and acoustics of the rooms where they’ll be installed. Once the necessary Hangouts Meet hardware has been delivered, the Deliveroo AV Manager flies out to the location, installs the equipment in two days, signs off on it, and flies back.

“Videoconferencing is crucial,” says Asif. “And with Hangouts Meet we can have just one AV person in the whole business setting up and overseeing the infrastructure in 14 countries.”

Issuing new devices in one-tenth of the time

Deliveroo facilitates its exceptional growth rate by minimizing the time teams need to spend getting to grips with new tools. “With G Suite, users don’t have much that they need to learn,” says Asif. “That means we can deploy the solution in any country and be comfortable that people can walk into a room and connect to a meeting without problems.”

Asif and his team worked closely with Netpremacy to make training in G Suite tools efficient and accessible, for new starters and anyone who wants to learn. “Collaborating on Docs and Sheets, and using Drive to share files instead of sending attachments allows us to move more rapidly than any other business,” says Asif. “That’s why we have permanent staff in the IT team who concentrate exclusively on the onboarding process, so anyone can learn to use one of the G Suite products in just one hour.”

Introducing Pixelbooks is the latest step in Deliveroo’s pursuit of speed and efficiency. “Previously, it took an average of 50 minutes to set someone up on a laptop,” says Asif. “With Chrome devices, that induction period is down to five minutes. We just open the box, enroll the device, and hand it over.”

Creating a cloud-based company

“Our strong relationships with Netpremacy and Google Cloud product managers mean we can align our internal strategies with them. Working together, we can create the ideal environment for our culture of collaboration.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

Using G Suite, Deliveroo is building its ideal workplace to support a more mobile, agile approach to work. “By the end of next year, we should have the vast majority of new starters using Pixelbooks,” says Asif. “We expect that to increase the use of Docs and Sheets and other G Suite tools, in place of other applications. We want to see ourselves as a cloud-based company, and G Suite is ideal for reaching that goal.”

As part of the further deployment of G Suite tools, Deliveroo plans to roll out more Jamboards, in addition to the 14 already in use across the business. “Previously, we would take photographs of whiteboards and share those,” says Elliott. “I remember seeing someone wheeling a whiteboard back to his desk from a meeting, and thinking ‘That poor guy is going to have to sit at his desk and copy everything down.'”

“At that point, before Jamboards, we actually made a significant financial investment in another interactive whiteboard solution,” adds Asif. “Now that solution is collecting dust, because we’ve got Jamboards, which are much more cost-effective and work brilliantly within the G Suite system.”

“Our strong relationships with Netpremacy and Google Cloud product managers mean we can align our internal strategies with them,” says Asif. “Working together, we can create the ideal environment for our culture of collaboration.”

Embracing the cloud helps Deliveroo both to enable rapid collaboration and to minimize the maintenance and management of infrastructure: an ideal combination for a fast-growing technology company.