Feature: secrets of selling SaaS

DMSBT was one of the first partners in Australia to join the Google Enterprise program, and when it took up Google Maps in 2007 it went on to become the biggest Maps partner in the Asia Pacific. The opportunities for Google Maps turned out to be far larger than plotting the location of stores on a website, says Herman Leung, director of enterprise operations. “It’s about looking at the use cases. One of the secrets of the Google products is that they can be used in any business.”

Logistics companies have used Google Maps for asset tracking, and franchises have plotted customer concentrations to determine where to open stores.

DMSBT’s work ranges from development, consultation and support of Google Maps implementations, some of which can be quite complex depending on the systems it integrates with, Leung says.

As one of the pioneers in the Google cloud, DMSBT has been compelled to train technical staff. Darragh Murphy, a computer systems graduate from Ireland who joined recently, says that while it has been a pretty steep learning curve, Google has tried to make it a smooth process.

“The Google products are all based around common technology and adapting to them is relatively straightforward. Google provide extremely well-documented APIs and the documentation in general is pretty extensive. It allows us to speed up the development process,” Murphy says. 

Murphy, who has a masters in mobile technology, has been helping develop mobile implementations of Google Maps. The latest version automatically provisions a mobile version so most of the customisation is around improving ease of use.

“A lot of companies are obviously identifying the benefit of having a mobile platform especially with the introduction of multi-touch surfaces,” Murphy says. The PC interface included more information – store locations, opening times, routing and directions, information bubbles and filters. Mobile interfaces had to be rethought with bandwidth consumption and screen size in mind.

Customers often think of geographical data as complementary to the text on a web page, and want a small map on the side of the screen, Murphy says.

“We like to lead them into the flip side of that so the users can find content they’re interested
in more easily depending on the specific location, as opposed to textual and then having a graphical representation of that textual data.”

More recently DMSBT has added Google Apps to its portfolio, which the cloud integrator sells to all types and sizes of customers, from five to 5000 seats. DMSBT focuses on the smaller end of town, les than 1000 seats. “We see that space as having a lack of focus from some of the other partners in this space. They’re after the trophy deals.”

The upside of smaller companies is they are more agile and nimble which leads to faster deployments.

DMSBT sells Google Apps by showing how it removes the operational headaches of owning your own servers. “Why don’t you streamline your business, forget about infrastructure, servers and maintenance, and worry just about running and growing your business?” Leung says. 

DMSBT sells several services other than migration and consulting including change management. “If you interview anyone that had issues with a mass migration it would be because they focused on the actual migration part and not considered everything that’s gone on around it,” Murphy says. “Training users and change management is the most important part of a successful migration”.

Given that teaching a customer’s employees the new ropes of Google Apps is more important than the migration, were technicians the right people to lead training?

Leung says he considered getting more professional trainers who didn’t come from an IT background but found that a technical understanding of the product was essential.

“There are always going to be a couple of unique queries from people who are used to having a different system and wondering how they replicate those functions. We found that you can get the professional trainers in but the actual level of knowledge transfer is limited because they’re just following the script.

“We prefer getting consultants like Darragh who can actually talk the lingo in terms of technical and user experience to provide that change management.”

Murphy says that typically the biggest hurdle for companies is migrating from Microsoft Office to Google Docs, which has a comparatively simple interface compared to the feature-rich, beribboned Office.

Another stumbling block is the abolition of version control. There is no need to email versions of the document among colleagues with Google Apps. Instead, Google Docs encourages users to “It is sometimes a mindblower, that you can have people using the one document at the one time,” Murphy says.