Fairfax Media Goes Google

Posted by Stuart McLean, Head of Google Enterprise Australia and New Zealand

(Cross-post note from the Official Google Australia Blog.)

In an increasingly web-enabled world, the speed of sharing information continues to increase at a stunning acceleration. This has changed the way businesses in every vertical operate, but no field has been more impacted than the media sector – businesses that deal in information itself.

Today Fairfax Media, a leading multi-platform media group in Australasia, announces that it will provide its employees with Google Apps for Business. This makes Fairfax Media one of the largest Google Apps customers in the Asia-Pacific region, and they join fellow Australian companies such as Visy, Jetstar, Flight Centre and Ray White. After a successful Google Apps pilot program earlier this year, Fairfax will now work with Google Apps Premier Reseller, Cloud Sherpas, to ensure all staff have access to Google Apps by November 2012.

The Fairfax Media group comprises metropolitan, rural, regional and community publications and websites across Australia and New Zealand. High profile mastheads include The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and The Age, along with their corresponding national news websites.

A key part of Fairfax’s business is about quickly, efficiently and expertly providing information and content to its readers and customers — and the multi-tenant communication platform that Google Apps provides will help keep Fairfax at the forefront of its industry. Google Apps is a central part of the company’s “Fairfax of the Future” program transforming it into a “digital first” media organisation.

By taking up the heavy lifting of storing data and managing infrastructure, going Google will allow Fairfax to focus on being a media company and not worry about also being an IT provider. And the real-time collaboration in Docs and communication facilitated through Talk and Google+ Hangouts will allow reporters and editors working in various locations to overcome geographical barriers.

We're excited to see Google Apps as a key piece of Fairfax's transformation into the future model of a media company. These tools will allow Fairfax not just to allow employees to work in the future but to let the entire company better concentrate on the thing they do best — keeping the public informed.