Japie Saunders, Argility/Smollan Technologies, Managing Executive – Google Solutions.
Argility, the Google Workspace Premier Partner and Smollan Technologies company, has announced the successful completion of a group-wide migration of Smollan from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace. The project ranks among the most complex multi-domain, multi-region Google Workspace deployments ever executed globally, as it spans southeastern, southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (SEEMEA) regions.
Smollan is one of the world's largest retail services enterprises and operates over 365 days across 25 companies, 19+ countries, eight languages and 24 time zones.
The migration moved 9 064 users, 7.01 petabytes of data, 2.4 billion e-mails and approximately 290 billion documents, achieving a 99.77% verified success rate with zero operational downtime and zero data loss. Argility's team resolved more than 8 500 support queries throughout the transition while keeping the business running around the clock.
A transition built on 15 years of experience
Argility/Smollan Technologies did not approach the migration as a theoretical exercise. In 2010, the 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. Fifteen years of running its own business on Google, migrating its own infrastructure and refining its own strategy, this experience 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.
That heritage shaped the methodology used for the Smollan Group deployment: Google's three-pillar framework of: technical deployment, change management and project management, run in parallel and governed by a dedicated project management office (PMO) with migration executed in controlled cohorts and a rollback protocol available at every stage.
What is the significance of this achievement?
Smollan operates across 60+ markets globally, with teams collaborating in real-time on retail execution and client data around the clock. Microsoft 365 was not built for that borderless, real-time, AI-augmented model. Google Workspace, with Gemini AI embedded directly into Docs, Sheets, Gmail and Meet, was chosen to give Smollan's global teams a single, live, cloud-native environment with enterprise-grade security and centralised administration across every time zone.
The next move – Chromebook adoption
The natural next phase is Chromebook adoption across the business, with Argility already holding 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 hand teams already living in Gmail, Docs and Meet an even simpler day-to-day experience, with fewer support tickets for IT to manage, driving lower device costs, near-zero malware incidents and 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, not just an upsell.
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.”
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,” concludes Saunders.
