Why AKQA Made the Jump to Cloud Collaboration

The digital marketing agency AKQA had a problem. With 900 employees scattered across the globe, to say nothing about the clients, collaboration could be a problem. Document revisions and discussions took place in an endless volley of e-mails, leading to lost work and miscommunications. Teams tried various solutions to try to manage their work, but eventually IT decided to step in and deploy a global solution: Huddle. Yesterday, we looked at some data on how early adopters see cloud computing. Today, I talked with AKQA’s Executive Director of IT Robert Burns about why his company made the jump and how it’s working out.

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Burns says AKQA needed something cloud based because of its mixed environment of PCs and Macs and its need to collaborate externally. The company looked at SharePoint, but decided it wasn’t ready for external use. Having a solution outside the firewall was crucial.

AKQA investigated other solutions, but was unable to try them all. Burns says the only way for AKQA to know if a solution would work was to put it in front of a client, so the agency had to “go all in” with a product. The company ultimately settled on Huddle.

Ben Kepes writes that it’s not actually that important which vendor AKQA chose in the end, the important thing is that they made the jump to a cloud-based post-e-mail collaboration system. That’s probably at least partially true. But there are a few reasons, according to Burns, that AKQA chose Huddle in particular:

• Unlimited storage
• The support – Huddle was quick to respond to questions.
• Active Directory integration

Burns says there have been no problems and no downtime. I find the “no problems” claim difficult to believe, but it does sound like AKQA has had a good experience with this transition. Burns is happy with scalability of using a cloud solution because the agency doesn’t have to make any internal infrastructural investments to grow.

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