LTech – Holding Hands in the Move to SaaS

LTech is a company that has a long partnership with Google – originally they were a systems integrator helping organizations deploy Google search appliances. They now focus more on easing the deployment of Google apps into enterprise customers – they’ve been a Google Enterprise Partners since the program was launched.

There 20 staff have helped deploy around 600 000 users to Google apps, roughly a third of which have been educational deployments, half to a single ISP, Wild Blue, who moved their customers to Google apps and the remainder to businesses of all sizes.

As well as migration, deployment and training services, LTech is now moving into the business of providing add-ons for enterprise users of Google apps and they have two fresh offerings in this area.

Single sign on

The LTech single sign on offering is intended to make it easier for enterprise customers to use both legacy applications and web apps. The offering allows for customizations of log in, log out and change password screens allowing them to be matched to a corporate website. LTech differentiates their product frm the other SSO offerings for the following reasons;

• Price
• Password management provides a change password page along with password updating in both Google Apps and the LDAP data store.
• Customization of the product is available

While single sign-on is a reasonably busy space, LTech are confident their differentiators will let them show their heads above the rabble.

Power panel

The power panel provides for much more granular control of permissioning than is available from Google apps. Interestingly it’s a similar play to that of KashGuard and regular users will remember the epic storm that arose over that particular offering. As an aside I wonder if commenters who lambasted KashFlow for allowing an application like KashGuard will do so around Google/Power panel.

Power panel can be integrated with the organizations active directory to automate the provisioning, deprovisioning and permissioning of users.

Power panel also has an interesting feature called contact journal. This allows a full trail of emails to and from a particular contact. While this sounds only moderately interesting, a feature like this lends itself to some integration with external sources to create a sort of social CZRM that provides visibility not only between the communications between individuals, but also the context and framework within which those people sit – it’s this sort of space that offerings like Gist are hoping to fill, LTech, with it’s obvious enterprise credentials, has a leg up when trying to sell this sort of high-value offering