A crazy thing happened on Tuesday...
My boss actually requested that I look into the possible advantages/disadvantages of using Google Drive versus MS Office and get him a report before Monday morning.
Thinking about this topic from more of a managerial perspective and not just from my lowly analyst spot, there would be several aspects of this decision that would need to be considered aside from the basic features. A drastic change of this nature could be costly, time consuming and cause significant production issues/delays. As of our latest reports, MetLife had 66,000 employees, but just for purposes of this discussion let’s take a look at only the Investments Department, which currently has roughly 750 investment professionals around the globe.
Since we are in the process of upgrading to MS Office 2010, let’s use that cost as a starting point. The cost of MS Office 2010 professional for Investments is roughly $262k ($349.00*750 employees). The last time we upgraded Microsoft suite was 3 years ago, so let’s assume we can annualize the $262k over 3 years – it comes to approximately $87k/year for our department.
Now, Google Drive may look enticing, however the free option only supplies 5GB of storage. Google Drive does have several options with different price points ranging all the way up to $800 per month (16 TB of storage). This is the missing link however in my cost investigation – in order to fully evaluate the cost-benefit analysis we would need to dig deeper into the cost of our data storage currently. Assuming we would need 400 GB of storage per individual, this is a cost of $20/month. That comes out to $180k per year ($20/month*750 employees =$15k/month * 12 months = $180k/year). That is higher than the annualized cost of MS Office, however as previously mentioned I don’t currently have access to the cost of our data storage. We would need that piece of the puzzle to completely evaluate the costs.
Another thing to think about is productivity. I can see how hard it has been for many individuals even switching from Office 2007 to Office 2010; moving over to something completely different may be seriously detrimental. (It’s only one instance, but I know of a person who took their laptop home after their upgrade and reinstalled Office 2007 because they could not manage trying to figure out the new upgraded software.) I would say it took me approximately 2-3 months before I was completely comfortable with the new versions of Excel and Word (which I use most frequently). After 3 months, I’m still not 100% up to speed with PowerPoint, but I’m definitely comfortable using it. Switching to something like Google Drive could easily take 6-7 months for everyone to be fully functional again.
All that being said, my major concern would be integrating Google Drive with our existing data hierarchy. I don’t know how the data warehouse, our trading system and accounting systems would interact with Google Drive whereas now everything downloads directly to Excel. We have also begun rolling out the new Business Intelligence tools to various groups, something that has helped efficiency significantly. We would need to test this application with Google Drive.
Lastly, security is something that we should also be cognizant of. We would need to scrutinize our data and the security we have compared to what Google Drive would be able to provide us with.
Overall, my recommendation would be to further evaluate the amount of data we maintain and the cost of our existing data storage, if the cost is significantly more than Google Drive we should start testing Google Drive’s capabilities in integrating with our existing systems and further evaluate their security measures.
