At Google Next ’19 and partner summit, Google asked SIs, managed services providers (MSPs), and consultants to get educated, connect with customers, and build solutions with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—reusable specific solutions within industry verticals and horizontal functional areas.

Basic cloud is a commodity service and enterprises seek to avoid vendor lock-in. Google humbly acknowledges that partners have choices; there are other cloud platforms. Google wants to be one of the vendors, not necessarily the main vendor, in a multi-cloud strategy. HFS examines what Google is doing to increase its chances of success and some recent developments in its services partner ecosystem.

Google and partners must balance respective resources appropriately

HFS checked in with Google again since noting it “must shake up its internal and partner talent model.” There is market pull for Google’s “magic,” and customers often want Google engineers along with software and cloud services. Google’s customer engineers go beyond traditional pre-sales engineer responsibilities into the ongoing relationship in conjunction with account managers and customer success. And there is a Google professional services group that is growing, but on a tight rein, focusing only on higher-level architecture and design. The day-to-day maintenance, implementation, integration, and solution building is precisely where Google wants partners to focus, with domain knowledge and legacy systems understanding.

Google is simplifying its processes, and there is potential for bargains

Forty percent (40%) of deals currently originate with partners and Google wants to include partners in every deal for higher win rates, faster deal cycles and increased deal sizes. Geographic regions (EMEA, APAC, the Americas, and Japan) now have more flexibility; simplified sales processes remove previous constraints, and devolved responsibility means regions are empowered to manage pricing and margins. Accountability is at the profit/loss level for the region, not individual customers or products. Regional leads can balance loss-leading and lucrative engagements with sensitivity to local market conditions without having to seek approval from headquarters for every deal. Similarly, previously disparate partner programs are newly consolidated for consistency and clarity.

Partners are needed to solve challenges with relevant cloud solutions

Google sees 90% of its total addressable market (TAM) in six target industry verticals: financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, communications (including media and entertainment), and public sector. Google counts on partners proactively finding opportunities to drive digital acceleration; for example, Google Cloud for Retail can support demand spikes, hyper-personalization, product search, and recommendations. Journeys include

• Multi-cloud expansion: This spans application modernization (including Anthos), on-premise modernization, hybrid cloud, compliance, and security.
• Innovation: Embedding intelligence into operations and industrializing data solutions are key, through data transformation.
• Data: Across industries, Google needs partners to access on-premise data for Big Query to ingest, manage, and visualize data at scale in the cloud.
• Workplace transformation: This includes rolling out, supporting adoption of, and maintaining G Suite.
• SAP upgrade and modernization: This is not just moving infrastructure to the cloud or migrating to S/4HANA lift-and-shift style, ideally transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) by blending transaction data with other data in-house or from third-party sources.

Partners are ramping up capabilities with lots of Google support

Google’s partner program is coming of age, supporting partners’ engagements with learning paths per solution tailored to specific roles, playbooks, pitch decks, partner industry hub, and a competitive insights hub. Payback is visible in partner progress and growth intentions:

• Deloitte brings Contact Center AI, clinical data warehousing, genomics, and imaging solutions to healthcare and life sciences organizations. Financial services specialists integrate solutions to meet challenges in financial risk, analytics, fraud, and crime. Specialized retail solutions, including demand forecasting and supply chain optimization, help retailers anticipate customer expectations.
• Accenture is working with Vodafone on a cloud-based electronic data warehouse (EDW) and Sainsbury’s supermarket to develop a system of analytics supporting data-centric customer services, with actionable insights at store and supply chain levels. Accenture is pursuing hyper-personalization, transforming marketing, sales, and services data into contextually relevant services with artificial intelligence (AI).
• HCL plans to increase its 1,300 Google trained experts to 5,000 in its Google Cloud business unit concentrating on: SAP, Anthos, data solutions, application and data center modernization, workplace transformation, and DevSecOps. HFS expects to see talent pressures intensify if more providers pursue similar increases.
• Atos has almost 1,000 certified Google Cloud engineers. It recently announced a win in transformation and migration to SAP S/4HANA with Melitta. Google Cloud is Atos’ preferred vendor for Atos Database Hotel, a private cloud solution hosting Oracle landscapes; managed workplace (as-a-service), delivering up to 50% savings with G-Suite; Kubernetes on-premise with Anthos; Atos digital and open hybrid cloud management; data center exit strategies; and Atos’ AI lab.
• Mindtree works with the German retailer Metro to predict demand. Using agile methodologies, Mindtree took transactional data from SAP into Big Query and combined it with external data in a supplier collaboration portal. More is planned for SAP and master data management (MDM).
• LumApps customer successes include Airbus’ SharePoint implementation and Google Cloud Search at Colgate Palmolive and Veolia.

The Bottom Line: Cloud is merely a foundation layer to Google’s software goodies for collaboration and harnessing data. Organizations are intent on implementing AI. Services partners’ verticalized and functional solutions are needed to contextualize digital native Google’s creations for the rest of the business world.

The threat Google faces is a normalization of multi-cloud strategies in the land grab phase with AWS and Microsoft Azure approaching duopoly. Google needs to be (at least) the second string and is relying on being the “friendliest” vendor and easy to work with to gain favor. It’s pulling the pricing lever, too; existing partners say this is persuasive. While price is a risky long-term play for Google against Alibaba’s expansion attempts, it’s very useful for partners right now. Occasionally, Google funds services partners’ exploratory design thinking, proof-of-concept phase to increase win probability. Training is often free, too, suggesting confidence in “land and expand” approaches with enough expansion that both Google and partners recoup initial investments.