Canada’s national broadcaster CBC switches 12,000 employees to Google Apps

Just a few days after we learned that the city of Boston had dropped Microsoft and switched 20,000 employees to Google Apps, Canada’s national broadcaster CBC announced today on Google’s Canada Blog that it has transitioned 12,000 employees to Google Apps in just 90 days.

CBC’s Senior Enterprise Architect made a point of noting that the company looked at both Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps before making the decision to go Google:

With a company-wide goal to reduce infrastructure and a need for better messaging and collaboration, we decided to look at public cloud solutions such as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. It was clear that Google Apps was the right solution for us based on cost, proven service level and availability guarantee and the breath of tools the platform offered for collaboration. We also had great support from the media groups in our company (about 70% of our employees), as many of them had been using personal Google accounts to communicate already with external users. Once we decided to “go Google” we were able to complete a smooth 90-day deployment with the help of Google Apps reseller, Onix , by March 1, 2013.