Google today announced its largest contract for Google Apps for Business to date, revealing Spanish bank BBVA has signed up to the public cloud offering.
The deal will see 11,000 employees of one of the world's largest financial institutions migrate over to the likes of Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, by the end of 2012.
Although a deal of this scale is impressive for any firm, Google claimed it was particularly telling of change in perception of public cloud that a financial organisation had taken the plunge.
"Companies of all sizes, including those with tens of thousands of employees, are now embracing cloud computing," said Sebastien Marotte, vice president of Google Enterprise in EMEA.
Companies of all sizes, including those with tens of thousands of employees, are now embracing cloud computing.
"[The BBVA deal] shows that cloud computing is now a reality and leading organisations are already realising its potential to transform their business."
However, the bank's customer information will remain in-house and the tools will be used for collaborating on business operations.
"We were looking for a technology that would transform our business operations, not just make our workers more efficient," said Jos Olalla, chief information officer (CIO) at BBVA.
"Integrating the Google Apps for Business suite with our own tools will allow us to introduce a new way of working where employees have access to all the information they need with just one click, no matter where they are, and can reap the benefits of using advanced collaboration tools."
BBVA has employees in 26 countries around the world. However, the roll-out will start with the 35,000 employees in Spain before the rest of its global offices get the cloud productivity suite.
