When great teams and exceptional software work together, the result can be more than just world-class systems – it can pave the way for business growth and innovation.
This is according to Japie Saunders, managing executive for Google solutions at Argility/Smollan Technologies, who says the successful completion of Smollan’s group-wide migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace shows how teamwork and the right software can transform business.
Argility is the Digicloud Africa Google Premier Partner practice operating within Smollan Technologies, the data and technology arm of Smollan.
Saunders says the project, ranked among the most complex multi-domain, multi-region Google Workspace deployments ever executed globally, depended on excellence from all stakeholders.
“Google builds the platform and continually enhances it. Google Cloud distributor Digicloud Africa makes it properly available on the continent, along with the training that lets partners do something useful with it. We handle the delivery, and a client like Smollan carries the risk of going first. Take out any one of those and nothing happens, or something happens badly and quietly gets written off,” he says.
“Over the past two years in the implementation of this project, we have watched all four parts of that line do their job at once, while the platform in the middle of it has changed more than most people have noticed.”
Google Workspace evolution
Saunders notes that Google Workspace has changed over the past 12 months.
“The clearest signal of change came at Cloud Next in April, with something called Workspace Intelligence. It is not an app. It is a layer running across Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets and Chat that understands how an organisation’s information relates to itself,” he explains.
“It indicates which document belongs to which project, who works with whom, what your company means by a word that means something else everywhere else. Most AI tools only connect to your data. This is built to understand it.”
On top of that sits Workspace Studio, generally available since December.
Saunders elaborates: “Someone in finance describes, in a sentence, what should happen when an invoice arrives and that becomes an agent running across their mail and their files. No developer involved. Then Google added skills, which I suspect is the piece most organisations have not even realised yet: a skill takes the way your company does something – formats a proposal, reviews a contract, writes a status update – and turns it into a reusable thing anyone can invoke.
“In a business running in eight languages across 24 time zones, that is not just a convenience. The knowledge of how we do this properly has always lived in the heads of people who have been around a long time and it leaves when they do. Now it can be an object you hand someone in their first week.”
He also highlights the importance of governance: “With Google, administrators can view and suspend agents, or revoke a single permission on a single flow. Gemini DLP stops Gemini reaching Drive content based on labels and conditions. Data processing can be pinned to a region and client-side encryption lets a company deny access to anyone, Google included. Before those controls existed, the conversation with a CISO ended the same way every time.”
Making IT work
Saunders notes that software does not install itself or create value on its own.
“An agent platform is worth nothing in a company where nobody trusts it. A skill that encodes a procedure is worth nothing if nobody could describe the procedure in the first place. The difficulty has moved away from technology and toward adoption, governance design and the unglamorous work of getting people to change how they work,” he says.
“That is the part we know and we know it because we did it to ourselves first. We moved our own business onto Google in 2010, which was a strange decision at the time. Fifteen years of running ourselves on the platform is why we were named a Google Premier Partner in 2024, across Google Workspace and Google Cloud, which puts us in roughly the top three percent of Google partners worldwide,” he says.
Someone has to go first
Smollan, one of the largest retail services companies in the world, decided to be among the first to move from Microsoft 365 to Workspace. “That is 9 064 users, 25 companies, 19 countries, 8 languages, 24 time zones, across 547 days, in a business that has no acceptable outage window or ever sleeps,” Saunders emphasises.
It worked, according to Argility: zero downtime, zero data loss and a 99.77% verified success rate.
Smollan CEO David Smollan says: “A change of this magnitude is not something to be underestimated. However, after a very well-organised process, I’m pleased that we’ve managed to cross over and our entire technology estate is now truly cloud-native. This is an enormous competitive advantage for us as a distributed organisation and we’re excited about the possibilities of working on the Google platform further.”
Saunders says: “What we took out of that programme was not really the migration tooling. It was the champion network, the multilingual training, the Gemini enablement that kept running long after go-live and the discipline of measuring whether people actually use the thing instead of assuming they do. The biggest lesson out of nine thousand users was blunt: technical deployment without genuine change management is a failed migration.”
But Argility didn’t just consult on this migration. “We lived it,” Saunders says. “Rolling out Google Workspace on our own infrastructure gave us a level of scar tissue and confidence no whiteboard exercise ever could.”
He notes that because Workspace is continually improving, partners must stay abreast of the changes.
“This is where Digicloud Africa sits and it is a more substantial role than the word distributor suggests. As Google’s enablement partner for Africa, they are the practical mechanism behind most of what we have built. Certifications come out of their enablement and certifications are what Premier status actually rests on.
“The Delivery Readiness Portal and its Tier 1 threshold unlock Partner Services Funds and Google competencies. Their rolling enablement programme tracks the platform close to real time, which right now means Gemini Enterprise, Studio, the agent platform, identity and deployment taught alongside change management rather than separately from it.”
Adding value to innovation
Saunders says: “The software often gets all the credit or the criticism, and it is never the whole story. In this implementation, four separate organisations had to be good at four different things for one company to end up on a better platform.”
“Most of our work now is focused on helping organisations get value out of what they already pay for. Which processes are worth turning into agents. How to configure governance so the security team says yes rather than maybe. How to run adoption so the platform is still being used well a year later. We are also pushing on Chrome Enterprise and Chromebooks, on identity and security, on our Cloud practice and the Education space, which is a larger opportunity across this continent than most people assume.”
In addition, his team is working to achieve Google’s new Diamond partnership tier, he says.
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