Google Cloud has unveiled a fresh round of partner updates and enhancements following 12 months of growth through the channel.
Unveiled during the Partner Summit at Next ’18 in San Francisco, the vendor has rolled out improvements across specialisation, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and technology integration, in response to an expanding ecosystem of partners both globally and locally.
“Whether businesses are moving to the cloud to speed up innovation, discover important insights from their data, or transform the way they work, they often need help,” said Nan Boden, senior director of global technology partnerships at Google Cloud.
“That's where our thousands of Google Cloud partners come in, offering everything from migration support and solutions built on our platform to value-added services.
“They’re an indispensable part of our mission to bring the cloud to more businesses.”
Since the start of 2017, the tech giant has increased the number of technology partners by x10, alongside more than doubling internal resources to support such growth.
Alongside key alliances such as Cisco, SAP, Intel and Salesforce, Google Cloud is also doubling down on the channel, emphasised through a string of new partnerships both globally and locally, such as Accenture, Deloitte and KPMG.
“Channel partners are also an integral part of our go-to-market strategy, and we’re delighted with the joint success we’re achieving,” Boden added.
“These partnerships are already having a positive impact on our customers, who can use Google Cloud through their existing partner relationships and generally get the benefits of cloud more easily.
“Today, we’re more focused on partners than ever. We think about how to involve our partners on every deal and in every customer engagement.”
Specialisation
In response to increased demand for niche solutions and services, Google Cloud has also increased specialisation levels to better connect partners with customers.
“Many customers need partners with a great deal of experience in a particular area to help them build advanced solutions for their businesses,” added Nina Harding, channel chief of global partner programs at Google Cloud.
“To help customers identify the right partner, we offer specialisations, a designation that recognises partners with deep technical expertise and proven customer success in a particular area.”
The vendor has designated 19 new partners in five new specialisation areas, expanding the program to nine total specialisations.
Locally speaking, Sydney-based OniGroup is recognised as a leading location-based services specialist, alongside Accenture in security and Deloitte and Rackspace in cloud migration.
“Partners who have earned a specialisation have multiple individuals on staff with the highest level of certification, demonstrated and documented customer success stories, and have passed a rigorous capability assessment from experts on our professional services team,” Harding explained.
SaaS
To facilitate future channel growth, the vendor has expanded Google Cloud solutions for SaaS partners, designed to enable the channel to deliver applications to customers.
Specifically, this includes a co-selling program that matches Google Cloud Platform (GCP) sales experts with SaaS partners to help deliver GCP-run SaaS solutions to customers.
Furthermore, a new program is now also available that connects Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team with SaaS partners to keep products up and running on Google Cloud.
From a go-to-market standpoint, new processes around marketing development funds (MDF) are also available, based on usage of GCP through the SaaS products partners drive, alongside a tailored online community encouraging knowledge sharing within the channel.
Integrations
From an alliance perspective, Google Cloud has also unveiled a string of new technology integrations, spanning vendors such as SAP, Cisco and VMware.
“Our ecosystem of partners provides the foundation upon which many of our customers build their businesses,” Harding added.
In the context of SAP, the vendor is collaborating with Deloitte to help customers extend cloud strategies into more use cases.
As a result, Deloitte will offer a full suite of solutions for running SAP applications on GCP, including the Deloitte Invoice Management Solution, which automates invoice processing in the SAP system landscape.
In addition, the consultancy firm will provide Deloitte Visual Inspection Solution, which automates the visual inspection process and accelerates tasks like inventory restocking.
Further updates are also in the works from a Cisco perspective, including increased partnership within the collaboration and artificial intelligence markets, backed up by a new developer initiative to drive innovation on hybrid solutions across the Cisco Container Platform and GCP.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud has announced a new plug-in for VMware vRealise Orchestrator so customers can use GCP alongside an on-premise VMware environment.
“This new plug-in lets users create vRealize Automation blueprints, which allow for end-user self-service catalogs, initiating Day 2 operations on Compute Engine VMs, reclaiming provisioned resources and more,” Harding explained.
“And it lets customers keep their existing governance and approval processes, making consumption of cloud resources more secure and trackable.”
