Founded in 2000 as a family business, SADA Systems geared up for fast growth in 2007 when it became one of the 10 original launch partners for Google Apps for Work, now known as Google Workspace. For SADA, business has never been the same. Today, the company has more than 200 employees, more than 3,000 customers served, and annual revenues of over $100 million.

As more companies became interested in public cloud, SADA worked with larger customers, helping well-known clients such as The Colgate-Palmolive Company, Hunderton Healthcare, and TVG Network improve productivity and collaboration while reducing costs. All told, SADA has successfully migrated more than 15 million users to Google Cloud. SADA also uses Google Workspace internally to enhance its own collaboration.

Building relationships for life

To help customers commit to their cloud journey, SADA works to create transformational value for each customer early on, often using Google Workspace as a first step. By taking a relaxed and informal yet business-focused approach to consulting and sales, SADA puts customers at ease from the beginning.

“We earn customers for life by enabling companies to gain a competitive edge,” says Jessica Hylton, Enterprise Consulting Manager at SADA Systems. “We pride ourselves on aligning with the Google vision and strategies — we are a fun, innovative brand, and our customers enjoy that. We also get excellent results and can help any business get the most from public cloud.”

Experience breeds best practices

Ten years of experience has helped SADA hone its deployment processes and develop best practices for Google Cloud migrations and rollouts. SADA leverages progressive planning, allowing customers to keep evaluating progress as the project moves on.

“Each customer is unique, and there are always unknowns in the initial stages,” says Nicky. “We use outcome-driven planning to constantly address those unknowns and make sure we’re addressing each customer’s specific requirements.”

SADA has also found that forming a tight-knit group for decision-making and executive sponsorship is critical to a successful cloud migration. Following that approach has helped SADA move some large customers to Google Workspace in impressive timeframes:

• Colgate-Palmolive: Migrated 28,000 global users in 6 months

• Digital First Media: Migrated 6,100 users plus an additional 850 users from an acquisition within 72 hours

• Hunterdon Healthcare: Migrated its entire workforce of approximately 3,000 users

“Those kinds of results are not easy to achieve in large enterprises, but our team can do it because of the best practices we’ve developed along with Google,” says Edmond.

Champions for the cloud journey

SADA recognizes the importance of identifying cloud champions from within the customer organization to help overcome any resistance about moving to the cloud. This happens early in the planning process, using a decision-making tree to identify key stakeholders from management, lines of business, and IT. Executive sponsors form a steering committee that meets regularly throughout the migration process to help guide the journey and address any concerns.

“Big organizational change like moving to the cloud is a daunting task for many, and failing to address that concern early on in the customer engagement is a big mistake,” says Edmond. “We found that engaging with IT first is the best approach, but if you don’t involve key champions including business users and executive teams, the adoption and consumption of new platforms and tools will likely fail. Enterprise consulting and change management services are where we have seen great success with our customers.”

Finding better ways of working

Every customer that SADA has moved to Google Workspace has quickly realized the benefits of new ways of working and collaborating. For example, a healthcare organization on the East Coast that historically dealt with a lot of manual processes helped its nurses be more productive with real-time collaboration and planning. Previously, nurses used paper-based notes, which required a transcriptionist to later manually enter the information into a database. Today, the process is entirely paperless using Google Docs and Forms.

At the same organization, the hospital director used to manually compile data from different contributors to produce variance reports to better understand profits and losses. Now this process is likewise streamlined, as contributors input data through Forms and the data automatically flows into Sheets for additional analysis and formatting. Afterwards, data can be easily output to Slides for business presentations.

“The soft savings that collaboration enables is usually much higher than businesses expect,” explains Edmond. “Building out requests for proposals is a great example. Instead of taking 20 people a month to generate an RFP through multiple workflows, they can collaborate in real time in Docs and get it done much faster.”

A winning combination

Already a vital contributor to the growing Google Cloud ecosystem — currently number two globally for GCP sales — SADA Systems has its sights set on the number one position. It’s working toward that goal by helping more companies realize the potential of cloud services, and by providing ongoing training and documentation to its customers about new Google Cloud solutions and releases.

“We strive to be the number one Google Workspace partner globally, and we can achieve that by focusing on exceptional technical consultation, implementation, and change management for our customers,” says Edmond. “Once they understand what the world looks like without traditional office systems and software — and how we can get them there — it’s an easy conversation.”