In Search Of A New Model

Safoian envisioned a new business model in which SADA would charge customers a flat monthly fee that included preventative maintenance.

The company wouldn't just fix problems; it would be responsible for uptime.

He pitched the proposition to small businesses around Southern California. They had never heard of such an IT management model, but loved the idea and signed up in droves, Safoian said.

Soon Safoian realized that "recurring, predictable revenue is really good."

But another realization also sunk in: Those services, involving technicians driving around town from office to office, and losing time sitting in traffic, were hard to deliver and expensive to scale.

Safoian started to think about a different approach to guaranteeing uptime and reaping recurring revenue. He convinced two customers to try something new: zero-infrastructure services.

SADA leased space in a data center in downtown Los Angeles, deployed servers to host email and other apps, and gave access to those customers through a terminal environment.

That experiment yielded another very expensive lesson.

Providing three or four nines of uptime was difficult and capital intensive. The project was rolled back, but the vision lingered.

Then, in 2005, an unexpected opportunity presented itself: Google approached SADA Systems with an offer to join its new enterprise program. Lacking partners well-versed in Microsoft technology, Google asked SADA to build connectors to Microsoft Exchange that they could bring to market together. The Internet giant's only enterprise product at the time was a search appliance. Safoian convinced his dad to spend $10,000 on a not-for-resale Google box so he could start playing with it. But SADA's customers were too small to fit the target market for the product, "so we didn't sell any search appliances at all," Safoian said.

While that particular product didn't pan out, SADA had forged a crucial partnership. About a year later, Google tapped Safoian on the shoulder with another offer.

If SADA implemented 10 items on a checklist, the company could be an inaugural partner for an entirely new product, one Google believed would offer a competitive option to the Microsoft platform.

Safoian listened intently to the description of a first-of-its-kind cloud-based office productivity suite.

"A light bulb went off," he told IT Best of Breed. "This was exactly what we were going to do in 2005 on our own. All we have to do is implement it and charge services."