Ancoris announced that independent luxury hotel group Moran & Bewley’s Hotels is to transition 200 email users to Google Apps for Business. The move comes as Moran Hotels consolidates its systems following the acquisition of Bewley’s Hotels in March 2008.

Google Apps for Business  replaces the Alt-N MDaemon email server run by Bewley’s Hotels, and was chosen in preference to transferring accounts to the Microsoft Exchange 2003 server in place at Moran Hotels. In addition to making use of Gmail with integrated IM (Google Talk), employees will have access to Google Calendar, which will allow them to easily share their calendars with others to enable them to efficiently co-ordinate schedules, as well as organise events and meetings. A further 100 to 150 users are likely to be transferred from Exchange to Google Apps for Business if the initial rollout proves successful, and the hotel group intends to investigate making use of other features of Google Apps for Business over the longer term as a replacement for Microsoft-based technologies.

Leonardus Russouw, Moran & Bewley’s Hotels’ Head of IT, says the hotel group chose Google Apps for Business primarily on cost grounds: "There’s simply no comparison between the cost of using Google Apps and switching the user accounts from MDaemon to Exchange, both in terms of user licences and ongoing maintenance effort," he explains.

Other factors influencing Moran & Bewley’s Hotel’s choice were the low management overhead of the cloud computing solution from Ancoris, and the generous mailbox storage offered by Google Apps for Business, which will eliminate the need for mail archiving. "Limits on the size of our Exchange mailboxes means I have to spend considerable time archiving old mails. With Google Apps for Business providing 25GB of mail storage per user, archiving is no longer a concern," Russouw says. "In addition, although Exchange works fairly well, it takes a lot of time and effort to manage and maintain it. With email provided through a cloud computing solution from Ancoris, I no longer need to spend my time managing mail servers. At the end of the day, it’s a worry-free solution."

Ancoris was chosen to supply Google Apps for Business to Moran & Bewley’s Hotels on the basis of a successful pre-existing relationship supplying the Google Message Discovery (formerly Postini) for use with Moran & Bewley’s Hotels’ Exchange server. "We've always experienced very reliable service for Google Message Discovery: as regards uptime, we’ve never been let down by it," Russouw says. "We’re confident that email as part of Google Apps for Business will be equally reliable." 

Russouw adds, "With Ancoris, you also get very knowledgeable people and excellent service. Any time we’ve had any kind of issue, or been looking to do something new, the response from Ancoris has been very quick and professional. There’s always been someone at the other end of the line who knows what they’re talking about, and who’s willing to take the time to discuss our needs with us."

David McLeman, managing director of Ancoris, says, "We’re delighted to help Moran & Bewley’s Hotels with the challenges of integrating the two sides of its business while driving down costs in tough economic times. For companies like Moran & Bewley’s Hotels, Google Apps for Business represents a very cost-effective way for IT teams to deliver highly reliable, high quality IT solutions to users based across multiple locations. We're seeing massive demand in for Cloud Computing in the hospitality sector where organisations want to achieve more for less."


About Moran & Bewley’s Hotels:

Moran Hotels is a group of independently owned and operated four star hotels in Dublin, London and Cork. In March 2008 they purchased Bewley’s Hotels, a group of six hotels located across Dublin, Leeds and Manchester. This acquisition brought the total number of bedrooms owned by the group to just under 2500. For more information, visit www.moranhotels.com and www.bewleyshotels.com.

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