For those of you interested in how Google Apps can be deployed in a large enterprise setting — in particular, a large pharmaceutical company, Genentech, with >12,000 distrubted employees — you will probably want to register for the upcoming Google webinar on “Achieve Success on Enterprise-class Google Apps Deployments“.

Here’s a brief description of the event and about Genentech’s adoption of Google Apps:

Achieve Success on Enterprise-class Google Apps Deployments:
Learn how Google Apps is used at a leading company with thousands of distributed employees on Thursday, December 4th, 10AM PST.  Hear from one of the chief project leads on the people, process and technology considerations that made the deployment a success.  Register here.

Genentech turned on Google Calendar for its 12,000 employees last month. Located in South San Francisco, Genentech is a leading biotech company focused on discovering, manufacturing and delivering medicines to patients with unmet medical needs. Genentech recently decided to adopt Google Apps and wanted to make a sure the migration went smoothly.  The company deputized “Google Guides,” promoted Google Apps as superheros called the “Google Squad” and built out great training materials amongst other innovations. And even though Genentech expected a record number of helpdesk tickets to flood its “war room” given the size of the deployment, to the surprise of everyone, including Todd Pierce, the CIO of Genentech, the staff hardly heard a peep.

More and more companies are moving away from traditional/legacy infrastructure and migrating towards a SaaS approach, so for an industry like pharma that tends to lag behind,  I really think this webinar will be educational and informational, in terms of gleaming insights and experience from a company (in this industry) that is definitely way ahead of the game when it comes to technology adoption.

Also, I believe Genentech is one of those companies that adopts Salesforce.com (or Verticals on Demand on the Force.com platform) as a CRM/SFA tool. Since Salesforce.com has recently integrated Google Apps into their system, it will be very interesting to see if they demo how these tools may play a part in the overall sales detail and CRM/SFA implementation as well.