Speaker 1: 00:03 Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. Hi. I’m Max Clark, and I’m talking with Billy Franz, who is the director of sales and channel for SADA Systems.
Speaker 1: 00:22 Billy, thanks for joining.
Speaker 2: 00:24 Hey, Max. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Looking forward to it. So what does SADA do?
Speaker 2: 00:30 Yeah. So at a high level, SADA is Google Cloud’s number one partner of the year. We’ve got multiple awards throughout our history of being Google’s ecosystem. But, yeah, essentially, anything related to Google Cloud, and that that umbrella encompasses G Suite, Google Cloud Platform, Google Maps, Google Cloud Search, and then, of course, there’s a wide array of products and services under each of those umbrellas.
Speaker 1: 00:57 For somebody who’s not already engaged with a partner, you know, there’s this perception of why wouldn’t I just go direct to Google? I mean, I can go to Google’s website, and I can buy G Suite, and I can go to Google’s website, and I get into gcloud. And what does SADA do for me in that situation? And and why would I use SADA?
Speaker 2: 01:16 Sure. So that’s actually a very, very good and very common question. Why would a customer need to leverage a partner like SADA for Google Cloud? Many people are aware of this, but SADA previously held a Microsoft and Google Cloud practice. We actually sold our Microsoft practice back in March of 2019 and became laser focused on Google Cloud.
Speaker 2: 01:37 So in that regard, we are a true consultant in professional services, managed services, and assistance whenever it relates to anything related to a customer needing Google Cloud. As you can imagine, Google is a massive, massive company with 100 and 100 of employees. Sometimes companies like Google want to just create a product. And in this case, those products are G Suite, Google Cloud, MapSearch, what have you. There needs to be some sort of trusted adviser or assistance with the technology related to that.
Speaker 2: 02:11 Whereas Google can create the product, there needs to be somebody that can help that customer ramp up, whether it’s spin or even drive cloud adoption across multiple multiple business lines within the customer’s use case. So I would say there’s those components. And then from that standpoint too is we can also help a customer with their cost optimization or total cost of ownership analysis with workshops and events to actually help a customer maybe move away from a VM model and into a containerization. So like a what we call an infrastructure modernization or application development design, we can assist with those professional services engagements there. So that’s that’s kind of a a really high level about our capabilities and how we relate to to Google and why a customer wouldn’t want our services.
Speaker 1: 02:59 Let me say if I have a a simplistic answer for that, which would be Google’s a really big company, and they don’t necessarily wanna provide support. So if you need support, Google’s probably not the best case for that. And so Google says, here, talk to our partner. Or I’m trying to figure out how to migrate into G Suite or into Google Cloud. And Google, again, is not necessarily gonna help me do that.
Speaker 1: 03:21 So if I need help with that, I could go to a a SADA, and SADA will help me figure out how to migrate onto Google. Or if I make a decision of, do I wanna be on G Suite or Office 365 or on prem or off prem, or how would I leverage this? That’s something that Google wouldn’t necessarily help me with, but SADA would.
Speaker 2: 03:38 Correct. Yeah. So and to be clear, Google does provide support for that. In fact, whenever you purchase licensing agreements with SADA, SADA is the biller of record. But on top of that, you not only get Google’s traditional support, you actually get SADA support.
Speaker 2: 03:52 And, actually, that was a really, really good segue for something that I don’t really talk about too often. But we have customer success managers, account managers, and even technical account managers that act as like a cloud concierge. And that cloud concierge, they really focus on more so cloud adoption from a customer standpoint. And think of it from a customer perspective as an adviser on how to better utilize cloud to its optimal capacity. And these resources are not incentivized to to capture wallet share.
Speaker 2: 04:23 They’re not incentivized to help drive revenue. They’re simply there to act as a, like I said, a a cloud concierge for the customer. So you get that feature on top of Google support. So it’s it’s just an additional resource. And on top of that, a piece I I always kinda bring up to customers and to even channel partners out there is, think about the last time you as a customer loaded a trouble ticket, the different levels of engagement required here and there, and the different routing that you got from a big company, like the multiples out there that exist.
Speaker 2: 04:54 Imagine now having that trusted adviser like SADA to come in and handle those those escalations from start to finish and actually own the engagement. In fact, Google grades us as a partner in their ecosystem based upon customer satisfaction, adoption, implementation, customer success, and satisfaction, and then also the revenue that we generate back and forth to Google. So that’s a really good idea and example of what’s happening.
Speaker 1: 05:17 I mean, this isn’t in conflict with Google. Google wants customers working with SADA to make their experience with Google better. I mean, this is very much a a symbiotic relationship and an ecosystem that Google is building out with their partners now.
Speaker 2: 05:31 Yeah. Spot spot on. Exactly. In fact, that’s actually the the whole reason that that, SADA recruited me over was to to come over and help build out an inside sales and grow the channel practice to help drive new logo and new business back to Google. And then on top of that, and as you talk about the symbiotic relationship, you’re spot on.
Speaker 2: 05:51 We go hand in hand oftentimes with Google, and it’s important to call out that customers will not pay anything extra by being on solid paper and purchasing Google Cloud. So we pass our same price that Google gives us onto the customer, and all our features and services are bolted on.
Speaker 1: 06:10 We should probably talk about something a little bit more basic here, which is why Google in the first place? You know, as as an enterprise is making this evaluation of a shift to a cloud or a change in their productivity suite or their email platforms if they’re not already on g Suite. Right? Like, what what is the driver into Google, and why are companies picking Google versus alternatives in the market?
Speaker 2: 06:33 Yeah. So that’s a really, really good question and actually quite common at at the various workshops that I go to. So thanks for asking that. If you look at Google and their claim to fame, Google’s first step into kind of the the enterprise segment was indexing the Internet, which as we know is a really, really freaking hard task to do that that’s constantly updating all the time. Right?
Speaker 2: 06:57 So if you take that component, there are artificial intelligence pieces, and then on top of that, providing a positive and quality customer experience enabled through machine learning, you kind of start merging the 2 together with AI and ML, kind of 2 fancy buzzwords that customers and partners like to use and talk about. Google is kind of the pioneer for that, especially in the cloud space. So as you start talking about databases and how do you start analyzing and indexing that database and getting the most value out of that dataset and the data science pieces around AI and ML, Google Cloud leads that component. And then I would say another factor that’s that’s kind of been the leading charge on this is we’re starting to see developers, I don’t wanna say move away from VMs and into containers or microservices, But, realistically, coders and developers out there are enabling containerization and utilizing microservices to get applications deployed at a faster rate. Google was actually first to market in orchestrating Kubernetes, which is the orchestration engine around the microservices.
Speaker 2: 08:01 And that Kubernetes, because Google believes in an open cloud platform, has enabled their Kubernetes engine to be open sourced, and now you’re seeing AWS adopt their Kubernetes engine and then Azure as well. So realistically, as developers are changing the way that they code from monolithic services to microservices in in app dev, it only seems to be a natural fit to to be on Google Kubernetes engine rather than to other resources that are playing catch up.
Speaker 1: 08:33 Are you seeing enterprises shift from, you know, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 into G Suite? I mean, is this a common practice now within SADA of making that transformation for people?
Speaker 2: 08:44 Yeah. So that’s actually a really, really cool shifting gears there. Right? Going from GCP to g Suite. So yeah.
Speaker 2: 08:50 Absolutely. We we see that very, very common. Most people don’t actually know, but about 12% of Fortune 500 companies are actually on G Suite today. And in fact, 75% of the education market is actually utilizing Gmail and G Suite in some capacity across the nation. So, again, that’s 75% of our education market.
Speaker 2: 09:10 So what we’re seeing from a competitive standpoint and and customer standpoint as to why they would move away from 0 365 or even Lotus Notes over to G Suite is 3 main drivers. The first is cost. And Google actually just released a new package called G Suite Essential, which is Google Drive. And included in Drive are Docs, Sheets, and slides. So it’s kind of the editors to compete with the productivity suite of 3.65.
Speaker 2: 09:40 And then you also get Google Video Chat in that essential package. And then there’s basic business enterprise, and you can think of those as 6 1225 for the pricing model. So it comes up to a little bit less than your 0 365 competition. And then on top of that, you can play UCaaS consolidation around that suite. And then the second driver after cost is the collaboration features that G Suite enables.
Speaker 2: 10:05 And that’s collaboration around device agnostic. So you can bring your laptop, desktop, tablet, your phone even, and get pretty much cross functional, super ease of use pulling from the cloud. And then on top of that, the the tradition with minimalist design. So the ease to use the functionality, the collaboration aspects where you and I, Max, are in the same chat. I noticed you sent over a Google Doc to prepare for this, which I absolutely love.
Speaker 2: 10:30 I hit you back with some comments on there. We got to share a few things really, really quickly, and we didn’t even have to set up a conference call prior to this to to hash out what we wanted to talk about. So I loved it. And then the 3rd right is recruitment. As I mentioned before, 75% of today’s education market is already utilizing G Suite.
Speaker 2: 10:46 So we’re seeing a a really, really big provider out there or I’m sorry. A really big customer out there is a consultation firm that is known for hiring specific Ivy League NBA candidates or NBA holders. And to get ahead of their competition and to stay one step ahead of everybody else, they adopted G Suite so that they could ramp up their new hires at a faster rate. So those are kind of the the 3 big things on G Suite adoption. I’ll I’ll summarize them again.
Speaker 2: 11:15 It’s cost, collaboration, and recruitment.
Speaker 1: 11:19 In traditional IT models, you’d be installing Word, Excel, PowerPoint on the computer, and the IT help desk would be supporting those. With Google, this is a browser based application. It’s running in the cloud. Your support cycle changes a lot with that. And that, again, comes back to what is SADA doing for me as an enterprise.
Speaker 1: 11:34 I can’t troubleshoot somebody’s Google Docs installation because it’s not installed every anywhere. Right? It’s it’s, it’s it’s a very different animal. I have conversations with enterprises and, you know, the Chromebooks come up a lot. You know, as people talk about, like, device fleet management, what are we doing?
Speaker 1: 11:49 What’s our what’s our standardization? How do we structure this information? How do we protect it? What is SADA seen around Chromebook and Chromebook adoption? Is this something that is trending upwards within enterprise users?
Speaker 2: 12:01 Yeah. So now you’re now you’re kinda getting a really, really fun package. Right? If we can kinda get the, the trifecta of sorts for a customer that wants to to purchase Chromebooks, get them utilizing G Suite licensing on top of those Chromebooks, and then have that plugged in and try and get that customer to utilize Google Maps and adopt the GCP platform for their workloads. Now you’re talking a real massive Google shop.
Speaker 2: 12:28 There are customers out there. You know quite a few of them. We actually had a very, very large customer out of North Central United States. They they are a large pizza making company, and delivering pizzas, but they bought a lot of Chromebooks from SADA. And we’re seeing a lot of around those Chromebooks.
Speaker 2: 12:51 The the adoption there is is mainly because of simplicity and ease of use. Again, touch screen, flip model, you put the g Suite laces on top of it. You’ve got an out of the box solution that all the way from top to bottom of your employee stack can utilize this hardware and this technology, and it’s, again, very simple plug and play. So we are seeing that, the licensing as far as across the board, G Suite, Chrome, and then get the Chromebooks, and then get the g GCP spend. So spot on.
Speaker 1: 13:22 Who are your customers? I mean, what what what is this? Is is a is it an industry vertical specific or geography specific, or is it sizing? You know? I mean, if, you know, are you are you talking about companies that are over a certain employee count or within certain ranges?
Speaker 1: 13:37 I mean, what becomes that makeup of a company? Let’s say they’re already on g Suite or have already made the decision to go to g Suite or they’re already on GCP and they’re looking for a partner, you know, what what becomes, you know, a a natural fit for SADA?
Speaker 2: 13:51 Sure. So I would say any customer for GCP, right, that is looking to optimize their cloud, their infrastructure, or change the way that they they go to business within a cloud model. So GCP, actually one of our biggest clients that if you go into SADA SADA’s website, you’ll see a really, really cool video produced with MadHive. They started as a as a tech startup in adtech and came over to SADA and got to see the white glove treatment on how we how we bring a customer and how we drive utilization and adoption on GCP. And now we have a fantastic relationship at the c level engagement back and forth and our support model and how we have enabled and helped Manheim grow as a customer of GCP.
Speaker 2: 14:36 And then on top of that, getting them to drive the adoption and actually becoming a champion for GCP. So and they started as a start up, and now they’re a massive company out of the I think they’re out of the East Coast. Maybe they’re out of LA. But, essentially, they I forget exactly where their HQ at, but they they have grown from a small start up to a very successful company with a very strong business model in ad tech. From a g Suite customer perspective, we like to stay around at minimum a 100 seats or so and then grow from there.
Speaker 2: 15:05 And then on top of all this, right, I I wanna be very clear too because I didn’t highlight this on the g Suite methodology, but we have resources that can assist with change management and digital transformation. So if the customer needs workshops and understanding how to utilize the G Suite productivity set or need workshop on how to drive digital transformation and creating champions all around the ecosystem, We have those resources available to assist a customer in driving adoption utilization across G Suite and GCP. And sometimes we can actually get Google to help subsidize those resources if they’re new to the platform.
Speaker 1: 15:44 Sure. I mean, it’s in Google’s best interest, of course, to help, you know, get people using the platform. And at the same time, it’s a big one for the enterprise because when you deliver tools, the people aren’t using the tools. You know, you’re paying money for the tool that you’re not you’re not taking advantage of. I wanna go back for a moment to SADA’s integration and support with the customer.
Speaker 1: 16:01 Because you offer different layers of support, and we should talk about this from both G Suite and and GCP. You’re not an all or nothing shop. I mean, there is some some options and select you know, customization, selectability, and and what levels of engagement are. So starting with G Suite, what does it actually mean for an enterprise of where you can integrate with just the IT department all the way down to something maybe a little bit little deeper into the structure of the organization.
Speaker 2: 16:24 Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So from that standpoint, as far as, like, integration in working with a a large enterprise, what we actually are seeing quite a bit more in the space is a small segment within a large customer wants to adopt G Suite. So in this example, we’ll just take a large financial institution.
Speaker 2: 16:44 Their marketing arm would prefer to be on G Suite rather than the alternative. And once you get 60 license, and so let’s say that the account is maybe 25 100 seats, but their marketing arm is about 60 60 headcount. So we go in. We talk with the CMO all the way down to the actual creative design team and why they need to utilize G Suite, drive the adoption on a small scale of 50, 60, a 100 seats, however many you wanna say. And it kinda creates this Trojan horse, this team that’s utilizing G Suite.
Speaker 2: 17:16 They champion it. They talk about it. They talk about it to their peers in sales or finance, sales operations, engineering resources. Right? And then all of a sudden, you kinda create a sticky product, and it grows and expands beyond it like wildfire, which is why I use the the detergent horse methodology.
Speaker 2: 17:33 Right? Like, get in there, talk about it, create some champions, and then grow it. So that’s kinda on the the g Suite side. For GCP, what we oftentimes see is collaboration between a CIO and CTO. So the CTO is gonna focus obviously on technology that is customer facing and how they can better their product.
Speaker 2: 17:51 What we see there is with g c GCP is its cost reduction and cost savings that the CTO can take advantage of to reduce his cost and pass along that savings to a customer to help his sales team win more deals at a faster rate. The CIO naturally wants to save on costs, same with the CFO. So what we try and do is is talk with the VP of architecture, VP of development design, and see what they want to do and how they wanna go to market, where we can find cost savings or reductions, and then on top of that, create some sort of automation or what workloads would be a good fit for that customer to deploy in GCP to either save on cost or create optimization.
Speaker 1: 18:32 And what’s great also with SADA is I can make a decision as a customer to I I’m looking for admin level interaction and support where my IT team is still gonna be dominantly responsible for the tools and and the you know, our internal users experience with this platform, but you’re gonna be able to provide a layer above that for expertise of how do we configure ediscovery or vaults or data loss prevention or these sorts of things where, you know, it would take a long time for that team to get up to speed on those things or or or understand what best practices are. And then you can go from there all the way down to end user support where, you know, hey. Here’s an 800 number, and here’s an email, and here’s how you interact with SADA. And if you need help with G Suite, you know, this is how you get support with that, and you can take that load off of an IT team if necessary as well.
Speaker 2: 19:17 Yeah. So you actually bring up a really, really cool point. The one of the cool things about G Suite and GCP is that a lot of those features are natively built into their design. Right? Like multi device management, data loss prevention, the vault storage for security purposes.
Speaker 2: 19:31 Alright? So most people don’t realize also that GCP is, to my knowledge, is the only cloud provider that actually encrypts data at rest and in transit. So it’s built with security in mind. And then from the standpoint of support, to your point, Max, is we at SADA, we have a 247365, 100% North American based tech support. So that is a really, really big value add to customers.
Speaker 2: 19:58 And, again, that that sits on top of the already existing support provided by Google.
Speaker 1: 20:02 Awesome. Billy, I could go on for a lot longer here, but, it’s been a pleasure, and thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 2: 20:09 Yeah, Max. Thank you very much for having me. It was really cool to be here. I appreciate it. I look forward to, hitting the links here soon, man.
Speaker 2: 20:16 Thanks, buddy.
Speaker 1: 20:17 Talk to you soon. Thanks. Thanks for joining the tech in 20 minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before.
Speaker 1: 20:28 We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
