Why Airbus transfers employees from MS Office on Google G Suite

In March, 2018 it became known of failure of Airbus to use office software of Microsoft. The aircraft manufacturing corporation in which there are more than 130 thousand employees gave preference to Google. 

That Airbus transfers all the personnel to G Suite packet, the Reuters news agency with reference to the message distributed by the management among the staff of the company reported. Migration from software of Microsoft will take place within 18 months after implementation of an internal pilot project on use of Google services.^[1]

Airbus decided to set G Suite instead of MS Office

The same corporate letter devoted to change of the office software was at the disposal of The Register. The edition specifies that the message is written on behalf of the CEO of Airbus Tom Enders. He writes that in the company digital transformation within which transition to software of Google is performed continues.

The chief information officer of Airbus Luc Hennekens confirmed to The Register authenticity of the internal message and noted that G Suite is established for more effective interaction of the employees working in the different countries and structural divisions.

Everything that we do, depends on people and their work together. We have incredibly difficult products demanding from the employees having different experience and specializations, very close work with each other. We try to reach personalized it — said Hennekens.

He categorically disproved the assumption that Airbus selected the new supplier of the office software for financial reasons.

If the price was the main cause, Tom Enders would not be interested in it. More important joint work and high flexibility, but not short-term cost reduction — the Chief information officer of Airbus told.

He added that the company studied different options, including Microsoft Office 365. It is interesting that earlier Luke Hennekens was Chief information officer in Qantas which he joined in several months after the company implemented Office 365.^[2]

Hennekens said that the solution Airbus to pass to Google is not connected with its past experience at all. G Suite was from the very beginning created for joint work, and traditional tools which were used by Airbus were based on software of Microsoft and e-mail.

We want that people essentially reviewed the work and refused old methods, such as sending millions of e-mails. It is much easier to reach it using the tool which according to the concept considerably changes the last modes of work and concepts instead of using one tool. It is a step forward, but nevertheless many approaches are similar to what we applied in the future... We want to change the organization and to carry out this transformation, but not just to update one tool — the top manager of Airbus reported, having added that an ultimate goal of these conversions is increase in output speed of products at the market.

Hennekens told that all staff of the company, including 40 thousand workers on production who never got digital support will pass to work with G Suite. The company wants that all its personnel — from design engineers to employees of workshops or accountants — got an information access which is directly necessary to them for work whereas before they had to read a large number of unnecessary e-mails.

Airbus became the next large cloud customer of Google. In March, 2018 the CEO of Google  Sundar Pichai said that during the period from 2016 to 2017 the number of the contracts worth more than $1 million connected with G Suite increased more than three times, and cloud business began to bring to the company more than $1 billion every quarter. The cost of the transaction with Airbus does not reveal.

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