National Moment of Silence

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Friday 12/21 9:30 AM EST

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Case Study: Google Apps Supports Strategic Growth at Merrimack Mortgage Company

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The Company

Founded in 1983, Merrimack Mortgage Company (MMC) continues to be a leader in residential mortgage lending throughout the Northeast and is one of the region’s largest independent mortgage bankers.

MMC prides itself for being the company that delivers the same products as the big lenders but with the high quality service levels inherent in a small lender. This winning combination of finesse and strength has led Merrimack Mortgage Company to its exceptional growth during the past three decades. The company’s success is attributed to its core strategy of providing a high level of customer satisfaction at a competitive price.

The Challenge

Merrimack Mortgage Company relies on extending its operations by expanding the size of the company’s geographic market area with new satellite branches. The IT department is challenged with bringing these loan officers located in satellite branches into the company’s processes effectively and quickly to allow them to be up and running as fast as possible.

The Solution

With integrated communications and file services, the transition to Google Apps was part of a strategic initiative to put the company in a competitive position to enable it to expand its operations effectively, from a primarily New England-based operation to cover their expansion outside of New England. This expansion included enabling a homogenous environment to all of the company’s loan officers while still complying with SOX, GLBA, ISO and other internal governance and audit requirements.

“The business side of me saw Google Apps as a slam dunk from a ROI and TCO perspective, and the technologist in me also couldn’t argue against introducing variable costs, scalability, availability, and OS and hardware independence. Cumulus Global recommended and helped us deploy CloudLock and Backupify for compliance, policy enforcement, risk mitigation, and data protection. This allowed us to fully embrace Google Apps and made both my Chief Compliance Officer and CFO very happy.”
— Matthew Seaton, CIO Merrimack Mortgage Company

Integrating Google Apps and CloudLock, Merrimack Mortgage Company extends its security perimeter to the cloud. MMC ensures its use of email, calendars, contacts, and files stored and shared via Google Drive comply with regulations like SOX, GLBA, ISO and other internal Acceptable Use Policies.  Backupify protection data across Google Apps accounts against data damage or deletion due to user error.

“I am not sure if I would have felt confident with my decision to move our company’s communication and collaboration needs to Google Apps for Business without the solutions and assistance from Cumulus Global. The integrated solution has relieved my anxiety over having our company data hosted by a third party,” said Seaton.  “Our management team was relieved by the value proposition.  We pay as we grow rather than making large up-front capital investments.”

Since MMC’s initial Google Apps for Business implementation in June of 2011, MMC has increased sales staff by 15% and the number of physical locations by 26%. Operations staff increases have been minimal in comparison. The greatest benefit, in regards to increased sales staffing and locations, is the ability turn-up new team members literally in minutes. In more recent months, MMC has seen back-to-back monthly company record breaking sales numbers.

To learn more about Merrimack Mortgage Company, visit: www.merrimackmortgage.com.

The Video Service in Google Apps

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OK, it is not really new.  But, major changes are in the works.   By the end of this year, Google Video for Business will be shut down with companies’ videos and the service capabilities moving to Google Drive.

Google Drive has many advantages over Google Video for Business. including:

  • Uploading and streaming HD quality video
  • Captions/subtitles in over 100 languages, and multiple tracks for each language
  • The ability to embed a video on any page
  • Advanced sharing controls, including the ability to prevent viewers from downloading the video
  • SSL streaming for secure watching of videos
  • User comments on the video page
  • API access to manage videos

Migrated Google Video for Business video files will not count against the user’s Google Drive storage quota (new videos will), and all links to them will be automatically redirected to Google Drive.  As the migration happens, videos will be stored in a folder named “Google Video for Business.”

Best Practices

While migrated videos will not count towards Drive storage quotas, future videos will.   Uploaded videos go through the same processing and compression as they did with the Video for Business service (a 30 minute video we uploaded uses only 28K), organizations that heavily use video may want to setup an additional user account to serve as the owner of videos.  By creating a central account, managing additional storage, when needed, becomes easier.

More Information

For more information, feel free to contact us.  Google has also published a nice help article on the subject.