Discovery leads innovation in media and entertainment through dynamic workplace transformation

In the past two decades, Discovery has moved from a purely cable business based in the U.S. to a global media and entertainment powerhouse. Like many other businesses in the industry, we’ve had to adjust to the unique shifts in people’s behaviors and preferences, almost all of which result from the rise in streaming.

We have always been consumer-obsessed at Discovery, with a corporate culture built on the desire to entertain and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds with exceptional content. As we’ve grown, we have also learned just how important it is to be staff-obsessed, giving our employees the best possible experiences so they can continue to innovate and deliver the world-class content our customers expect.

In 2019, we decided one way to fuel innovation and collaboration among employees was to bring in Google Workspace. Selected for its intuitive, easy-to-use, and constantly evolving tools, Google Workspace enables teams to seamlessly create, connect, and collaborate anywhere, anytime.

Given the scope of our ambitions, and recognizing the challenges of migrating 16,500 global employees to a new collaboration solution, we worked with Google Cloud premier partner SADA to get the job done.

Change management amid a massive migration

We began the move to Google Workspace by migrating our document storage system from a legacy cloud provider to Google Drive. This included 86 million items amounting to about two petabytes of data migrated with minimal disruptions. A few months later we completed our move to Google Workspace by migrating 1.2 million calendar invites and 20,800 mail accounts, including thousands of collaborative inboxes and delegated accounts.

In addition to the technical support and Google Workspace expertise that SADA provided, they also partnered with our project team on the change management strategy. Despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, our training team and SADA were able to offer outstanding educational opportunities to assist our workforce in the transition and to get the most out of Google Workspace.  This included collaborating on over 240 global webinars in seven languages.   

Discovering the power of transformative tools

Discovery has many types of end users, from finance professionals and marketing teams to producers and content developers. The fact that Google Workspace has been well-received across the company is a testament to the power of the solution.

Many of our teams have taken advantage of collaborative Gmail accounts and shared drives, providing them with a centralized location to seamlessly communicate and work together on team-focused projects. Our internal communications team is especially happy with the real-time collaborative editing experience within Docs as they work on company-wide emails, announcements, and other projects. 

These collaboration tools have allowed us to stay agile amid global lockdowns and will continue to do so as we adapt to a more flexible working environment.

The value of partnership

While we were comfortable with our legacy collaboration suite, one of the biggest benefits of switching to Google Workspace has been Google Cloud’s and SADA’s partnership. They provide us with regular updates on product roadmaps, upcoming features, and more.

This is just the beginning as we plan to grow, deliver new content, and lead the media and entertainment industry with the help of these two great partners and their solutions.

To learn more about Discovery’s journey with Google Workspace, read the full case study.