Salmat's CTO on Australian company's SaaS shift with Google partner Cloud Sherpas

Salmat is a leading Australian marketing services business. Its CTO, Dave Glover, is guiding the company as it looks to transform its office infrastructure onto the cloud.

What project have you recently worked on with a channel partner?

We rolled out Google G Suite and replaced mail, and everyone is on Drive and using Hangouts, Sheets, Slides and Docs. We started our Google journey with Cloud Sherpas [now owned by Accenture]. They came with a high customer satisfaction level and good references. We were very happy with their focus on the customer and their need to make sure we were satisfied with what they were delivering.

Where did they impress you?

Part of their delivery method around Google was very much focused on organisational change management (OCM) and making sure everybody in the organisation was on the same page, understood what they needed to do and was trained properly. Cloud Sherpas worked hand-in-hand with our internal OCM people to get the job done.

Do you see cloud playing a bigger role in your organisation’s future?

Our agenda has been to try and solve our back-of-house problem by trying to move as much as we possibly can to a SaaS model, to give us the headroom to put more attention on what we build for our clients. We made a decision on Workday and the moment that went live we began planning for the Google deployment. We have been a Salesforce customer for a long time and are growing it within the organisation. We have been an AWS customer for quite a while too and are moving more of our infrastructure into AWS. 

What role do you see partners playing in your future?

My experience is they play a really important role. But in the cloud space the solutions we are buying tend to be very niche. We have one partner where I have no idea if there is more than 10 people in the organisation, but they are all really good. 

We are moving towards a best-of-breed world. So you can now go out and buy yourself the best-of-breed and be comfortable they are going to work together. On that basis, you can then rely on small, best-of-breed third parties to help you deal with it.

The traditional guys are struggling a bit and the people who are trying to work in hybrid land, which is most of the traditional vendors and service partners, are trying to be all things to all people. This new breed, all they do is work with the latest cloud-based technologies. They are on the leading edge, the people they have are usually technophiles who love the technology and see the benefits of what the new stuff offers.