Executive summary
Smollan, one of the world's largest retail services companies, required the migration of its entire global organisation from Microsoft 365 and onto Google Workspace. This had to be achieved without disrupting business operations in light of the fact that the group operates around the clock across every time zone.
Argility, the Google Workspace Premier Partner practice within Smollan Technologies, led the transition, migrating 9 064 users across 25 companies, 19+ countries, eight languages and 24 time zones over 547 days. The team moved 7.01 petabytes (PB) of data, 2.4 billion e-mails and approximately 290 billion documents with a 99.77% verified success rate and zero operational downtime.
The result is one of the most complex multi-domain, multi-region Google Workspace migrations ever executed in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (SEEMEA) regions. The success of the operation, delivered on Smollan's own infrastructure first, bears testament to the fact that Smollan Technologies can run this transition for any enterprise client at scale.
About the customer
Smollan is a global retail solutions company that helps brands and retailers win at the point of purchase, operating across 60+ countries and partnering with some of the world's most loved brands. With services in sales and merchandising; activation and experience; and data and technology – Smollan exists to create growth for its clients and transform the lives of its people.
Founded in 1931 in South Africa, Smollan has grown into a global collective of more than 90 000+ employees, touching millions of consumer interactions every day. With a blend of technology-driven retail execution, in-store intelligence and brand experience driving human connection, Smollan is trusted by some of the world's biggest names.
Business challenge for the customer
Smollan's business spans 24 time zones, with teams collaborating in real-time on retail execution, category management and client data around the clock. Historically, it was running on a platform, namely, Microsoft 365, that was not built for the borderless, real-time, AI-augmented way Smollan needed to operate. This led to version conflicts and context loss across time zones. Moreover, it slowed collaboration, and the platform was not positioned to embed AI (Gemini) into everyday tools like documents, spreadsheets and e-mail.
For a global data-intelligence business where insight velocity is a competitive advantage, the productivity platform itself had become a hindrance to speed – it increasingly became a barrier to speed of action and operational efficiency of the business.
In a nutshell, achieving the following was essential to a successful outcome:
- Zero downtime tolerance – the business runs 24/7, with no acceptable outage window.
- Extreme scale – dozens of companies, time zones and languages had to be factored into the solution with no splitting of the organisation in mid-transition.
- Zero data loss – petabyte-scale estate, full integrity verification, multilingual training across every region.
Relationship context
In 2010, the Argility team made the exact same leap it now leads clients through: from a Microsoft-dominated platform and onto the Google platform, well before cloud migration was the industry norm. This is an important practical experience and technology skill differentiation from approaching the hugely complex Smollan migration as a theoretical exercise. Argility’s implementation was the result of 15 years of running its own business on Google, migrating its own infrastructure, and refining its own strategy, which culminated in Argility being named a Google Premier Partner in 2024. This is an elite designation held by the top 3% of Google partners worldwide.
The solution
Argility's approach
Argility built the migration on Google's gold-standard three-pillar framework: technical deployment; change management; and project management. These all run in parallel rather than in sequence in order to close the gaps between work streams that typically cause disruption in large-scale programmes.
Delivery was phased by cohort (sequenced by business unit, geography and risk profile) and governed by a dedicated project management office (PMO). A full environment assessment and tenant architecture design was completed before a single user was moved, and a co-existence strategy that maintained Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, running side by side throughout the transition window.
This approach drew on Argility's own experience directly, giving the team first-hand insight into the operational and cultural friction of exactly this transition before ever running it for the wider group.
What Argility delivered
- Full environment assessment and Google Workspace tenant architecture: organisational units, admin roles, group hierarchies, domain configuration, identity migration (GCDS), SSO/MFA and dual-delivery mail flow to guarantee zero e-mail loss during cutover.
- Phased, cohort-based user migration, per business unit, geography and risk profile, with pre- and post-migration data integrity verification, a real-time migration dashboard for the client’s IT team, and an active rollback protocol for every cohort.
- End-to-end change management from day one: a Google Champion Network, multilingual enterprise-scale training (virtual, in-person and self-service), a structured Gemini AI enablement programme, and a minimum 30-day hyper-care period with Admin Console training handed over to the internal IT team.
Technologies, tools or methods used:
• Google Workspace
• Gemini AI
• Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS)
• SSO/MFA
• Google Workspace Admin Console
• Data loss prevention (DLP) policies
• Dual-delivery mail flow/co-existence architecture
• Cohort-based phased migration methodology
• PMO governance model
Implementation timeline
Start date: April 2024
End date: June 2026
- A total of 547 days of project delivery (18 months) end-to-end
Spanning:
- Discovery and assessment
- Tenant build and security configuration
- Phased migration execution (by cohort)
- Change management and user adoption
- A minimum 30-day hyper-care period per cohort post go-live
The results:
Quantitative: 9 064 users migrated across:
- 25 companies
- 19+ countries
- 8 languages
- 24 time zones
- Landing a 99.77% verified success rate
7.01PB of data, 2.4 billion e-mails and approximately 290 billion documents migrated with zero data loss and zero operational downtime.
8 500+ support queries resolved across 24 time zones, delivered over 547 days of project execution.
Qualitative results – power to the people
Beyond the numbers, the migration was a story about people.
Teams supported teams across regions; colleagues shared knowledge; and Google Champions stepped forward to support their own regions and functions throughout what was, at times, a genuinely challenging change that brought new ways of working, learning curves and moments of frustration.
Thousands of hours of training, demonstrations and support sessions were delivered around the world, and the global IT team and deployment partners kept the business running while transforming its underlying foundations.
The business impact
The migration has delivered to Smollan faster global collaboration capabilities, stronger connectivity and security.
Moreover, a more seamless employee experience, with Gemini AI now embedded across everyday tools, positioning the group as a more connected, future-ready, AI-enabled organisation. For Argility/Smollan Technologies, it is also a commercial proof point/use case example: having executed this at group scale on its own infrastructure, the team can now offer enterprise clients a de-risked, benchmarked M365-to-Workspace migration proven methodology.
Client voice
David Smollan, Smollan Chief Executive Officer, says a change of this magnitude is not something to be underestimated. “However, after a very well-organised process, I'm pleased that we've managed to cross over and our entire technology estate is now truly cloud-native. This is an enormous competitive advantage for us as a distributed organisation and we're excited about the possibilities of working on the Google platform further.”
Lessons learned – what we learned from 'living this challenging implementation'.
A word from the Argility/Smollan Tech Team Leader:
Japie Saunders, Argility/Smollan Technologies, Managing Executive – Google Solutions, says: “We didn't just consult on this migration – we lived it. Rolling out Google Workspace on our own infrastructure gave us a level of scar tissue and confidence no whiteboard exercise ever could. Very few organisations anywhere have moved this much data, across this many users and countries, in one programme without downtime – proof that enterprise-scale Workspace migrations can be delivered from this region, for global businesses, to a global standard.”
The migration confirmed that technical deployment without genuine change management is a failed migration; the Google Champion Network and peer-to-peer support were as critical to success as the technical architecture. Running M365 and Google Workspace in co-existence throughout the transition, rather than a hard cutover, avoided splitting the organisation and gave every cohort a safe rollback path. The scale of the deployment also proved that the phased, cohort-based methodology holds up even at extreme complexity.
What's next
Adoption monitoring and Gemini AI enablement continue post hyper-care, with usage data reviewed and reported to leadership on an ongoing basis.
The natural next phase is Chromebook adoption across the business: Argility already holds Chrome Enterprise Premier status alongside its Google Cloud Premier accreditation. Chromebooks are built to work natively with Google Workspace, so devices update automatically in the background and provide teams already living in Gmail with Docs and Meet – an even simpler day-to-day experience, with fewer support tickets for IT to manage. This in turn drives down device costs, near-zero malware incidents plus hardware that lasts appreciably longer between refresh cycles. For a retail services business managing thousands of devices across 24 time zones, that combination of tighter Workspace integration and materially lower running costs makes Chromebook adoption a compelling next step and not just an upsell.
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