Partner Spotlight: Agosto

Company: Agosto
Location: Headquartered in Minneapolis with offices in Toronto, Austin, and Houston
Market Served: All
Website: www.agosto.com

This week we heard from Irfan Khan, the Co-Founder and CTO of Agosto, a leading North American reseller, to find out more about his organization.

BetterCloud: When was your organization founded?

Agosto: We have been in business since 2001, so nearly 13 years.

BetterCloud: What led to the founding of your company?

Agosto: After the dot com explosion, a network engineer and a systems engineer needed food. We decided to create our own path and Agosto was born. It has paid off, though we’re still hungry for more.

BetterCloud: How has the market changed since you started as a Google Apps reseller?

Agosto: Initially, getting the message across to our prospects that Google was a viable alternative to legacy enterprise solutions was an uphill battle, simply because people weren’t aware of Google’s capabilities in the enterprise. Today, Google is in the news for its enterprise work with leading companies all over the world. Agosto’s own Google Apps client list includes well-known organizations like Corel, The Second City, Minnesota Wild, Dunn Bros Coffee and many more who are simplifying their IT, saving money and implementing solutions that are improving their businesses.

Google is also making frequent, automatic updates and improvements and is still offering the entire Apps suite for just $50/user/year. It’s getting easier to show the ease, cost effectiveness, price simplicity and ROI of Google Apps over other systems.

BetterCloud: Does your company have a certain specialty – Industry? Location? Size?

Agosto: Things that distinguish Agosto from other partners are our agility and expertise across the Google Enterprise suite of tools. We focus heavily on Google Apps, but are also a leading Google Cloud Platform partner, with our development team creating custom applications that leverage the scalability of Google’s infrastructure. We’re also a Google Search partner, which allows us to bring the power of the Google Search Appliance to our customers. And lastly, we develop geographically powered applications using Google’s mapping APIs.

While we do serve all industries, we have found that certain businesses are especially well-suited for the move to Google, including manufacturing, retail and media/entertainment. The cost savings, simplification of IT, collaboration and innovation that come from a move to Google are immediately apparent to the C-level, management and end-users in these industries.

As far as locations go, we’re working strongly in the north-central U.S. and Canada, though we have clients across North America.

Agosto works with companies of all sizes, with special emphasis on what we and Google call SMB (from about 50-750 employees), as well as those with 750-10K employees. We have larger clients, too. Really any size company can benefit from going Google and Agosto can help.

BetterCloud: Can you tell us one thing about your company we wouldn’t find out from your website?

Agosto: We’re a team of creative, energetic people that thrive on the challenges that our customers entrust us with. I hope that’s clear on our site, though we don’t say it explicitly–maybe I’ll ask our marketing team to add it.

BetterCloud: What is your favorite BetterCloud feature? Why?

Agosto: BetterCloud makes it easy to manage just about every user setting on any scale. I can create a label and filter for the entire marketing team, setup mailbox delegation for the sales staff and create a signature policy for the whole company all from one comfortable user interface.

BetterCloud: What do you hope to see from BetterCloud going forward?

Agosto: We’d love to see more advanced reporting and report scheduling tools. Also with the new APIs announced it will be exciting to see how BetterCloud integrates mobile device management, ChromeOS management and Chrome management.

BetterCloud: What do you hope to see from Google Apps going forward?

Agosto: It has already been a year of great changes and updates to Google Apps, but I hope we will see better Docs fidelity with Office, improvements to Google Sites and better Hangout quality. Hangouts could be a real game-changer for us and our customers. We’re already using them quite frequently for small video conferences.

BetterCloud: What are your company’s plans for this year?

Agosto: We’re in a period of significant growth, having already added 15 new team members in 2013 and we’ll continue to grow based on market demands, which are strong.

BetterCloud: Favorite cloud service your company uses, other than Google Apps?

Agosto: We’re in love with UberConference, Okta and even LunchBob.

BetterCloud: What’s the best thing about working at your company?

Agosto: Probably the flexibility. We have some team members that have to work the phones in certain locations at certain hours, but others work from home either all or much of the time, and others still who share collaborative office space or work in another state. By empowering employees to work where they want, when they want, I think they are happier and more productive. It also really follows Google’s concept of working from anywhere, on any device. At Agosto, we really do.

BetterCloud: Why should someone looking to “Go Google” work with you?

Agosto: With a development team that is truly unrivaled in the realm of Google resellers, we can create and help implement unique solutions that really solve our clients’ business problems, instead of just selling them products. We’re also a lot of fun!

For more information on all of our partners, visit bettercloud.com/partners.