Interview: How to sell Google and Microsoft together

CRN: Are you selling less Microsoft products since you starting selling Google Apps?

Cooper: No. We are probably doing increasingly more business with Microsoft as well as with Google. The whole market has expanded in many ways.

Roberts: There is a broadening of our offerings at the Microsoft end while the Google side is relatively new and focused around a much smaller set of products. We are doing a lot more work with Microsoft - Sharepoint is becoming pretty big space for us, .Net development space is very big as will be the Azure platform when it launches in Australia.

CRN: Do you ever pitch Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange to the one customer?

Cooper: We won't do that. We would make a decision for the client and go in with one or the other. We wouldn't put ourselves in the position of doing a bakeoff.

Roberts: If we're engaging at a strategic level where we are helping them put their roadmap forward, then we would possibly encounter that situation. But I think if that would be the case we would be above the line and wouldn't be eligible to do the implementation.

It would be seen that we would have a conflict of interest in the decision.

CRN: I've heard that Microsoft will cut out the channel when it goes up against Google Apps because it can't compete with reseller margins. Is that true?

Roberts: I'm not saying that's completely true. We have seen situations where they have gone to market with other partners, sometimes ourselves, and we've competed against Google.

There is certainly a lot of downward pressure on cost. I think what will probably dictate how they approach that is whether that opportunity is seen as strategic for Microsoft.

When either of the organisations identify that this is a battle they want to fight then they pull out all the stops in terms of making resources available to partners or internally to their own consulting organisations.

Don't forget that Microsoft has it's own consulting arm as well.

Cooper: Both giants are trying to win market share.

CRN: What do you use internally?

Roberts: We use Microsoft internally. Some use Google Apps internally but the strategic platform is Microsoft.

CRN: Are there any plans to change that?

Cooper: It's open for discussion. We have a strategic group that looks at that. Gerard (Roberts) and I put a discussion through to our IT strategic committee on some futures but we are a company of 1500 people and we've come out of a very strong Microsoft internal platform base so we would need to consider the benefits of a future shift.

There are some costing benefits to moving to spam, virus filtering in the cloud and we went with a Google product for that.

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