Big Changes Coming Next Month to Google Cloud Partner Advantage
"Things are about to get a whole lot more exciting,” one consultancy tells Channel Futures.
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Google Cloud is doubling down on its intent to bring partners ever closer to every aspect of the customer life cycle. After announcing a series of new certifications (“Premier badges”) in January, the cloud provider is taking its channel program to the next level.
On Aug. 1, the premier designations will take effect within Partner Advantage. As a refresher, the structure now goes across three engagement models: Sell, Service and Build. They apply to Google Cloud, Google Workspace and Chrome. Partners may specialize in one or all domains.
As a side note, Google Cloud partners already have earned “greater than 180% more certifications” in the first half of this year than they did compared to the same period a year earlier, Bronwyn Hastings, vice president, ISV ecosystem and channels at Google Cloud, told us.
“The partners are on the journey with us and they’re increasing their overall investment in that specialization domain so that they can actually be represented as strong in the market,” she added.
From there, Google Cloud also is changing up things for partners in three key ways.
For the first shift, partners will validate their “deep, deep product expertise and proven experience” by earning one or more of the aforementioned badges, Hastings said.
Second, Google Cloud will reward partners “who are actually driving and delivering that customer success,” Hastings said. That includes encouraging consumption of Google Cloud services and capacity.
Finally, Google Cloud will deliver “unique resources, tools, ways of actually engaging the partner to get those competencies and make sure that the feedback loops are there, so that it’s not us telling the story, it’s also the customer telling the story,” as Hastings put it.
What do those resources look like?
The Delivery Readiness Index, launched last year to measure partner readiness, capacity and services delivery capabilities; lab environments; and Net Promoter Score access. Each of these items is intended as “an enabler, not punitive,” Hastings explained. “It’s meant to actually support the partner in what they’re meant to do.”
That way, partners can see where they’re performing strongly and pinpoint where they need to brush up on skills.
Combined, all these new approaches will result in a move to life-cycle compensation. More vendors are adopting this system as the world moves from reliance on legacy hardware to cloud and software. This does mean some partners have to keep getting used to building recurring revenue, rather than relying on large, one-time purchases for income, but that’s been an industry-wide metamorphosis long in the making.
We don’t have a dollar amount but Google Cloud is going big on the indirect channel. The company is “increasing the overall funding available in incentives available to partners, recognizing all of the stages of the life cycle with us,” Hastings said.
That means partners not only facilitate the pre-sales (e.g., proofs of concept, generative AI planning, etc.) and actual sales process, they also deliver the services and, in many cases, management expertise, around what they’ve sold. Or they can opt for co-delivery alongside Google Cloud (in which case, Hastings emphasized, the company’s professional services division is not competing with partners for customers, as has been reported to happen with some other cloud providers). Along the way, partners earn the requisite incentives aligned to their level of effort and investment.
“It’s giving services partners something to step into, it’s giving the resellers something to step into, and to move with us on. At the end of the day, it’s focused on that customer value,” Hastings said.
As for where the extra money for channel is coming from, “it’s a combination of things,” Hastings said.
What matters is that partners get to decide how much they want to be involved and profit accordingly.
“We continue to be significantly invested in our partner-first approach and having 100% partner attach,” Hastings said. “So you can imagine why this is so important as part of the journey for partners to be part of that service acceleration with us, as we also look at the transformations customers are going through. … We’ve been feverishly working with the partners to do this.”
Next, we delve into Google Cloud’s more concerted or publicized focus on small and medium businesses, a demographic where most Channel Futures readers specialize.
The hyperscalers rarely talk about SMBs. That’s because enterprises, corporations and government agencies tend to be bigger moneymakers for them.
But Google Cloud surprised us with its announcement that a portion of its upcoming new incentives includes higher rebates for partners sourcing new or expanded deals with SMBs. Much of this ties to Google Workspace, because of its inherent, SMB-friendly capabilities, but not solely. (And, to be clear, Google Cloud is not pushing for SMB accounts over enterprise — representatives tell us they’re just talking about SMB more and extending the associated rewards.)
We asked Hastings about Google Cloud’s emphasis on SMBs with the new partner program approach. Here’s what she told us:
“We actually see a lot of the way we look at SMB as a good starting point of engagement with GCP. And we often see those customers grow, and grow quite fast over time. So it is a very good entry point for companies to consider GCP and build their businesses with the hyperscaler that also looks at innovation and looks at ways of growing right. … Maybe it’s not something we’ve spoken about a lot but … part of our focus is on SMB. … It’s actually something that we’ve been doing for a while. And we’ve been seeing that growth in there. And sometimes those customers even grow with us into something that would be more than SMB.”
Next, we catch up with two key Google Cloud partners for their thoughts on the upcoming channel program changes.
Asif Hasan, co-founder of Quantiphi, a channel partner with particular expertise in and focus on AI and data science solutions, said his company welcomes Google Cloud’s new “deep level of specialization.”
“[I]t provides customers an objective view of the partner ecosystem and their expertise, and it gives the partner ecosystem a mechanism to continuously upgrade the capabilities of their organization and serve the customers better,” he said.
So far, Quantiphi has completed the Premier track for in the Service and Sell models.
“We have developed two platforms to accelerate customer’s adoption journey on Google Cloud — one for conversational AI named ‘Qollective.CX’ and another for Gen AI named ‘baioniq,’ and, as a result, are seeking to achieve the Premier Partner badge for Build Engagement to serve customers in a platform enabled services engagement model as well,” Hasan told Channel Futures.
As for the shift toward life-cycle compensation, Hasan is enthusiastic.