The combination of high-caliber teams and advanced software can provide not just top-tier systems, but also act as a catalyst for business growth and innovation. This is the assertion of Japi Saunders, Google Solutions Managing Director at Argility/Smollan Technologies. He notes that Smollan's successful group migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace demonstrates how the synergy between a team and appropriate software can transform a business.
Argility operates as a Google Premier Partner practice in the Digicloud Africa space within Smollan Technologies, which is Smollan's data and technology division. Saunders emphasizes that this project, considered one of the most complex global Google Workspace deployments with multiple domains and regions, depended on the flawless execution of all participants.
He explains that Google provides and continuously improves the platform, while the Google Cloud distributor Digicloud Africa ensures its availability on the continent, including partner training. Meanwhile, the client, such as Smollan, takes on the risk by becoming a pioneer. According to Saunders, if any of these elements are excluded, either nothing will happen or something negative will occur, which will be quietly attributed to losses.
"Over the past two years during the implementation of this project, we have observed all four parts of this chain performing their work simultaneously, while the platform at the center underwent changes that were noticed by fewer people than would be desirable," he says.
Evolution of Google Workspace
Saunders points out that Google Workspace has undergone significant changes over the last year. The most obvious signal was the Cloud Next event in April, where the Workspace Intelligence feature was introduced. This feature is not a standalone application but a layer operating over Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Chat, capable of understanding the interconnectedness of information within an organization.
Workspace Intelligence helps determine which document belongs to which project, who interacts with whom, and what the company means by a word that has different meanings elsewhere. Unlike most artificial intelligence tools that merely connect to data, this system is designed to understand it.
Furthermore, Workspace Studio became publicly available in December. Saunders details: "Someone from the finance department can describe in one sentence what should happen when an invoice is received, and it turns into an agent working through their email and files, without developer involvement. Then Google added skills, which I think many organizations have not yet realized: a skill takes how your company performs a task—formats a sentence, checks a contract, writes a status report—and turns it into a reusable element that anyone can invoke."
In a business operating in eight languages across 24 time zones, this is not just a convenience. Knowledge of how to do things correctly has always resided in the heads of experienced employees, and it disappears when they leave. Now, however, it can become an object that can be transferred to a new employee in their first week.
He also stresses the importance of governance: "With Google, administrators can view and suspend agents or revoke one permission in one flow. Gemini DLP prevents Gemini from accessing Drive content based on labels and conditions. Data processing can be tied to a region, and client-side encryption allows a company to forbid access to anyone, including Google. Before these controls, conversations with the CISO always ended the same way."
Ensuring IT Functionality
Saunders emphasizes that software itself does not install or create value. He argues that an agent platform is useless in a company where it is not trusted, and a procedure-coding skill is meaningless if no one could initially describe that procedure. The complexity has shifted from technology to issues of implementation, governance design, and the unglamorous work of changing people's workflows.
"This is the part we know because we did it for ourselves first. We migrated our own business to Google in 2010, which was a strange decision at the time. Fifteen years of working on this platform allowed us to achieve Google Premier Partner status in 2024 for both Google Workspace and Google Cloud, placing us in the top three percent among Google partners worldwide," he shares.
Someone Needs to Start
Smollan, one of the world's largest retail service companies, decided to be among the first to switch from Microsoft 365 to Workspace. "This involved 9064 users, 25 companies, 19 countries, 8 languages, 24 time zones, and it happened over 547 days in a business that has no acceptable downtime window and never sleeps," Saunders emphasizes.
According to Argility, the migration was successful: zero downtime, zero data loss, and a confirmed success rate of 99.77%. David Smollan, CEO of Smollan, stated: "A change of this magnitude cannot be underestimated. However, after a very well-organized process, I am glad we managed to transition, and our entire technological infrastructure is now truly cloud-native. This is a huge competitive advantage for us as a distributed organization, and we look forward to further opportunities on the Google platform."
Saunders concludes: "The main lesson learned from nine thousand users was crystal clear: technical deployment without genuine change management is a failed migration." But Argility did not stop at consulting on this migration; "we lived it," says Saunders. "Deploying Google Workspace on our own infrastructure gave us a level of experience and confidence that a whiteboard exercise never could."
He notes that since Workspace is constantly improving, partners must keep up with these changes. This is where Digicloud Africa comes in, playing a role more substantial than just a distributor. As a Google implementation partner for Africa, they are the practical mechanism for much of what has been built. Certifications are issued due to their implementation capabilities, and the Premier status is based precisely on these certifications.
The Delivery Readiness Portal and its Level 1 threshold unlock Google Partner Service Funds and competencies. Their continuous training program tracks the platform almost in real-time, which now includes Gemini Enterprise, Studio, the agent platform, identification and deployment, taught alongside change management, not separately from it.
Adding Value to Innovation
Saunders believes that often the programs themselves receive all the glory or criticism, which does not reflect the whole picture. In this project, four separate organizations had to perform excellently on four different tasks for the company to successfully move to a better platform.
Most of their current work is focused on helping organizations derive value from already paid services. They determine which processes should be transformed into agents, how to configure security governance so that the security team approves the solution rather than leaving it pending. They also work to ensure the platform continues to be used effectively a year after implementation. Furthermore, they promote Chrome Enterprise and Chromebooks, identity and security issues, as well as their Cloud practice and education sector, which represents a much larger opportunity on this continent than many assume.
In addition to this, his team is working towards achieving the next level of Diamond partnership from Google.