When Google's top-boss Mohit Pande was caught off-guard

The panelists at the Google for Work conference for SMEs recently comprised Mohit Pande, country manager, Google For Work, Google India, Prakash Prabhakar, director, Deloitte, Vinay Barar, VP marketing and head -dealership, Powerica and Freshdesk's IT operations director Krishnenjit Roy. At the close of the event, a participant took the mike, sought the attention of the panel and concurred with a panel member's point. All good so far. But then, putting on his best promotional tone, he said his company dealt with cloud services and worked closely with Google, adding he could be approached for further queries. Initially flummoxed, the panelists immediately recovered and burst out laughing. Now, that's some out of the box advertising.

Bring in the new

Pressure to reach targets in a short time drove Powerica, a 33-year-old traditional organisation, to embrace new communication channels. At the same conference, Vinay Barar, VP — marketing & head — dealership, recalled how setting up a power plant project in Sudan lead them to shift from Postmaster, an internal mailing system, to Gmail. "One huge challenge was communicating with people across locations. The project was about Rs 120 crore in value. We had to submit around 2,000 drawings to be approved. Each was a size of 5-6 MB. There was no way our normal email would have handled it. And for us, it was need for speed. So, the budget team created personal gmail ids and we worked on it for two years and it was a success. We also used Gtalk (video feature) because otherwise it would have been expensive," says Brar.