• Unifies collaboration tools under one single platform, reducing the costs associated with maintaining multiple licenses

• Saves up to $12,000 per month today, compared to other communication tools used before Google Chat

• Supports seamless team collaboration and client communications, from anywhere in the world

Early on, Exterro’s founders recognized the importance of choosing cloud-based collaboration and communications solutions capable of scaling up alongside their company. By adopting Google Workspace, they could share ideas, files, and documents easily and securely in real time between global employees, all within a single cloud-based ecosystem.

Exterro’s Director of IT Infrastructure Mark Prewitt recalls that by the time he joined the company, Google Workspace was firmly established as Exterro’s go-to collaboration tool. “Teams were constantly sharing data across the world at this point, because while our sales, marketing, engineering, and deployment staff were in the U.S., most of our R&D was in India,” he says. “We were basically running a 24-hour business globally and needed a way to constantly communicate.”

Exterro’s focus on real-time collaboration was the primary reason Exterro initially selected the Google Workspace platform. At the time, its GRC software implementations could take weeks or longer as Exterro connected its software to customers’ systems where data resides. This involved constant communication between Exterro’s internal developers and customer IT departments. Having an easy means to communicate internally during these lengthy processes was crucial for the company’s success.

“We were holding a large number of collaborative meetings, sharing documentation for how to do the installs and sharing after-action reports,” recalls Prewitt. “Google Workspace was the tool we used for all that collaborative work. And it remains our main tool.”

For Exterro, one of the most important Google Workspace tools continues to be Google Chat. Years before COVID drove many companies to adopt a remote or hybrid working model, Exterro embraced Google Chat’s key advantages: the ability to communicate quickly, build community, and collaborate on projects all within the Google Workspace environment. “It's just so much more efficient to send a quick chat, as opposed to an email. You can immediately respond, and then you’re off and running in another direction. I just can’t imagine any organization not using a tool like this. Google Chat is essential to how we communicate,” says Exterro’s Chief Marketing Officer Bill Powonka. “I haven’t seen a tool that beats Google Chat,” Prewitt agrees.

Given its close integration with Workspace, using Chat also makes IT admins’ jobs easier. “It’s simple, it’s easy to use, you don’t have to launch something else. All of our SSO is tied into it. It’s all ready as soon as they fire up their computer. From an IT perspective, we don’t see why we would use a separate tool,” says Prewitt.

Exterro is a heavy user of spaces in Google Chat to help collaborate on projects. “For M&A we have spaces set up for the people constantly communicating back and forth to keep information flow active because frankly we’re all super busy and people don’t pick the phone up anymore, they Chat.”

As Exterro has adapted to hybrid work, Google Chat has become an important part of building community and bringing people together. “We’re in there all day long chatting. What used to be cross-cubicle communication now goes into Chat. The jokes, the communication. All of those quick questions all go into Chat. This is the new office, it’s now literally our space.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to adopt new and often unfamiliar remote and hybrid working models, Exterro was well positioned to adapt to the “new normal,” thanks in large part to its early adoption of Google Workspace. Already comfortable using collaborative tools such as Chat, Meet, and, Exterro team members across the globe didn’t miss a beat.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on being a somewhat virtual company,” says Piwonka. “And we proved that with COVID. We all went home and kept working. And we stayed in touch using Meet and Chat. COVID didn’t slow us down at all. We were already set up for success, because we had picked the right tools to start with.”

Even for Exterro’s team members in India, where limited bandwidth can be an issue for remote working, COVID wasn’t a problem. Because Google Workplace is a single, integrated platform, they could easily stay connected with their overseas colleagues via Google Chat, and Meet, using less bandwidth compared to relying on multiple disparate tools to deliver these features.

Piwonka adds that each one of their colleagues, across the globe, are increasingly productive and able to collaborate better than ever thanks to Google Workspace. “In this new era of hybrid and remote work,” he says, “Workspace has been able to deliver the cost-effective, scalable, and easy-to-use tools we need to support Exterro’s evolution as a legal software industry leader.”