In October 2013, Jeff Sloan took over at Global Payments, Inc. as CEO. Among his challenges were to transform the company from a payment processing enterprise into a technology firm providing comprehensive software solutions. The goal was to help the company stay ahead of competitors in the rapidly changing financial technology industry.

Within a few years, Global Payments had transformed itself into a leading global payment technology company. For a corporation with 10,000 employees in multiple countries, this would not be an easy task. And it wouldn’t happen overnight. At a high level, the transformation would in part require Global Payments team members to think differently and to collaborate in ways that would foster innovation and accelerate delivery.

But how do you motivate thousands of people to think differently? For Andra Milender, Chief Technology Officer of Architecture and Engineering for Global Payments, a key motivator was to disrupt the tools employees used every day. "It’s like making someone drive a new route to work," Andra explains. "Changing a routine usually means you have to think about what you are doing and find alternatives to accomplishing the task, achieving the goal. Changing your commute makes you think differently, drive a different path, consider new roads, and so on."

Improving and changing the tools employees used became one of the top selling points that persuaded Global Payments’ C-level executives to migrate the workforce to Google Workspace. Global Payments also works to foster a one-team mentality among employees. This is not an easy task as the company has grown and continues to grow through acquisitions and, therefore, has team members from different corporate cultures who are used to working in different ways on different tools.

"Along with getting people to think differently, we wanted our productivity tools to be reliable, available, and more secure, and we wanted to attract talent," says Andra. "Mostly, we wanted to enable everyone around the world to work together as one team to improve collaboration and innovate more quickly. Google Workspace enables us to do that."

Avoiding time-consuming management

The first step in the Global Payments transformation happened several years ago when the company moved some non-essential apps from on-premises to cloud-based offerings. Over time, Global Payments continued to acquire vertical software entities and needed to integrate a myriad of tools, systems, and data centers. "Data residency, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other regulations can be handled more easily in the cloud versus on-premises," Andra says. "Improving our overall economics for a productivity software solution provided another incentive to move to the more affordable and flexible pricing of Google Workspace."

"When we started looking at collaboration solutions, Google Workspace stood out," Andra says. "With Google Workspace, we could get away from having to own, manage, and deal with a productivity suite ourselves. Google Workspace is used by the next generation workforce. And I was immediately sold on Google Workspace based on the productivity benefits I’d learned about from one of our partner vendors as well as other companies making the switch from legacy tools."

The relationship that the Global Payments IT team developed with Google was another incentive to go all in with Google Workspace. "The personal attention given to us by the Google account and Professional Services teams went far beyond what I expected, especially from a company of that size. It is great that Google stands behind its product, and the Google team’s continued commitment to our success has helped ensure that we are getting the most out of our investment," Andra says.

Saves hundreds of hours

A majority of the Global Payments workforce — 80 percent — transitioned quickly to Google Workspace. "Most colleagues I talked to were ecstatic about the collaboration capabilities, particularly with Docs, Sheets, and Drive," Andra says. For example, spreadsheet templates are now easily and widely available across the organization via Sheets and Drive. In the past, if someone had updated a spreadsheet template, those updates might not have been shared with everyone who needed that particular spreadsheet. In turn, this could cause team members to submit completed spreadsheets without all the necessary information, causing a lot of wasted time as employees reworked deliverables after becoming aware of a new version.

"Our finance team was able to put together department budgets across 20 different teams in 15 different countries with no need to copy, paste, and merge content. Sheets provides us with one standardized tool to accomplish the data gathering task efficiently," says Andra. "One of our Sheets users saved 80 hours of time that would have been spent updating just one spreadsheet correlating submissions from several teams."

Collaboration made easy

Global Payments has standardized on Google Meet for video chat. "With Google Meet integrated into a browser, our teams don’t have to switch to another application or device for video conferencing and instant messaging," says Andra. "And they can meet using the device they prefer, whether it’s a mobile or desktop device."

Given how quickly things happen at Global Payments Sites has also proven invaluable for sharing materials and information. For example, an HR team planned to have an internal website up and running by a certain date to share time-sensitive employee benefit information. But as that date approached, the site wasn’t ready to launch. So an IT team sprang into action. "We quickly created a Google Site so that different organizations could view the time-sensitive benefit materials that were relevant to them," says Andra. "We never could have done that without the reach of the Google Workspace platform across our enterprise."

Enhancing reliability and security

Google Workspace has been highly reliable for the Global Payments workforce. "We’ve had only minimal service interruptions with Google Workspace, and that’s huge for us," says Andra. "With our distributed workforce, there is never an optimal time to improve or upgrade tools like productivity software. Even with highly available, multi-site architected deployments of such solutions, maintenance windows can be impactful to someone. Leveraging the power of the cloud to run these solutions eliminates disruption and the overhead of managing the footprint, freeing up valuable and scarce IT resources to provide incremental value on business growth initiatives."

The integrated security of Google Workspace apps is especially important to Global Payments. For example, the phishing and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features of Gmail have enabled the company to begin discontinuing the use of various third-party email security tools carried over from its legacy solution. This will help simplify administration and lower overall security costs to protect Global Payments data.

Moving further into the cloud

Aside from providing new business tools and ushering the digital transformation that Global Payments sought, Google’s close collaboration and support has also been a big advantage, especially during the company’s big-bang Google Workspace rollout. "We couldn’t have pulled off a company-wide rollout of Google Workspace if Google hadn’t worked closely with us," says Andra. "The relationship with Google has been awesome."

Global Payments is laying the foundation for a larger, more comprehensive move to cloud computing. For example, the company is currently building an enterprise reporting and analytics solution for its 2.5 million merchants that leverages Compute Engine and BigQuery.

The shift into the public cloud is representative of Global Payments’ larger business transformation strategy. "It’s so important to challenge the status quo when needed," Andra says. "As Global Payments continues to expand as a technology-enabled payment solution provider around the world, we needed to challenge our workforce to think differently about how we do business. Google Workspace enabled the team to rethink daily processes and improve collaboration. The Google team played a large part in helping Global Payments transform the way we work."