About the client
Google is a multinational technology company and the world’s most popular search engine. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Google owns and operates offices in 170 cities across 60 countries, to support 135,000 full-time staff.
Google contacted us in 2012 to create a robust and scalable visitor management solution for its global estate, including its YouTube offices.
The challenge
As a world leader in cloud computing, AI, quantum computing, and more, security is paramount for Google. The tech giant’s offices are a hotbed of innovation, with millions of staff and visitors passing through its doors every year.
Google needed a fast and efficient visitor management solution that would automatically collect, store, and organize visitor information to ease the burden on administrative staff. To support this, Google required a comprehensive back office where they could store visitor data, historical records, and analytics for real-time monitoring and reviewing.
The new solution also had to be globally scalable and easy to integrate with the company’s existing access control system and tech stack.
“Since 2012, [acre] has facilitated over 10 million visitors across Google’s global estate. We’re constantly adapting and evolving the software with Google, with the latest [acre] Visitor updates ensuring GDPR compliance.”
– Stephen Bishop, Chief Technology Officer, acre
The solution
Based on Google’s requirements, we identified our Visitor line of check-in kiosks as the ideal solution.
Our Visitor V7 kiosks are a fully autonomous solution, providing the simple and secure experiences visitors expect when they visit Google. For example, the kiosks can establish host responsibilities and visitor access authorizations instantly, simply by scanning the visitor’s badge. Our kiosks integrate seamlessly with a wide range of solutions and require minimal maintenance.
As part of the project, we also developed PiGate: an event management application within our visitor management solution. PiGate allows visitors to scan their badge’s QR code to enter authorized doors and turnstiles.
Google has adopted PiGate as their dedicated event management solution for all on-site events, ensuring visitors can access defined zones until they check out or their visitor badge expires.
The result
Adopting our self-service kiosks has enabled Google to optimize security and enhance visitor experiences at offices around the world. As a flexible, low-maintenance solution, Google has been able to effortlessly scale its security framework to adapt to new challenges and ways of working.
Other benefits include:
- Increased operational efficiency
- Comprehensive reporting
- Effortless third-party integration
- Built-in GDPR compliance
We remain Google’s long-term visitor management solutions provider to this day. Since 2012, Google has deployed our visitor management solutions in 120 locations, spanning 44 countries, and facilitating over 10 million unique visitor check-ins.
