Sundar Pichai - CEO, Google
In addition, the company is hiring a Asia Pacific SMB Partner Manager for Google Cloud, with the key responsibilities of driving G Suite and GCP sales through partner channels and direct sales teams.
“Partners are critical to the growth, adoption and scale of Google Cloud products,” the local advertisement stated.
“You will work with key SMB-focused partners to develop their Google Cloud business via sales and marketing campaigns, trainings and enablement.”
Collectively, it helps paint a different picture for a vendor renowned for its internet search capabilities rather than channel cloud credentials, creating a new need for cloud partners as a result.
“Professional services is the first part of the play for the channel, partners can provide a fixed fee design for the customer," Warrilow explained. “Google can’t scale and nor do they necessarily want to in this space, much like AWS and Microsoft.
"For resellers of all sizes, whether they are new to the market as a born-in-the-cloud provider or through professional services and consulting, they are open to that dance.
“The ticket to the dance is equally available to them. Enterprise will work with anyone who has strong skills in design.
“But where it starts getting challenging for the channel is when transitioning away from migrate - which is project work - to operate which requires 24/7 skills and 100 members of staff waiting on call. That favours a more established partner for Google but there’s certainly room to play.”
As explained by Warrilow, opportunities exist for partners around design work and fixed fee consulting style services, with enterprise organisations open to rewarding those capable of “bringing the brains” to the cloud conversation.
Strengths and weaknesses
In examining the cloud provider market, Warrilow outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the top three players, advising partners to evaluate key capabilities around performance and capabilities such as machine learning and intelligent cloud plays.
“AWS is not as strong in the office productivity stakes with Office 365 clearly a market leader,” he said. “G Suite is definitely second in this space, while Google also has strong credentials around machine learning.
“But IBM is also trying to enter that market and Microsoft has a reasonable story to tell, although AWS is still trying to catch up.”
Warrilow’s observations demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the channel aligning with specific vendors in the cloud, with each having deploying different go-to-market strategies.
“Microsoft has too many partners while Google doesn’t have enough,” Warrilow observed. “Microsoft is still evolving in what they do through the cloud and have been for a number of numbers.
"Even though they more or less invented this kind of ecosystem, they still have to adjust to cloud as well. Today, the AWS partner ecosystem is the most mature in cloud by a country mile.”
It’s a statement backed up AWS’ ability to provide a platform capable of luring independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers, through a framework capable of fostering innovation on a global scale.
“ISVs are important because they consume our platform, but more importantly they provide innovative solutions to our end customers,” Amazon Web Services head of channels and alliances, Stefan Jansen, stated in the November 2016 issue of ARN Magazine.
Take Versent as a leading example in Australia, an IT consultancy firm that has stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight on a full-time basis, emphasising the power of the product in a cloud context.
In servicing more than half of the top 200 ASX-listed companies, the business recently launched its new flagship product, Stax, designed to help Australian organisations access the power of the cloud through AWS, providing simplified management of workloads.
Likewise through Microsoft Azure, with ISVs also taking centre stage in the cloud, including local players such as Janison, Objective Corporation, Capstone and MailGuard.
For Google, ISVs will also be crucial to achieve scale in the cloud.
Managed services
Meanwhile across Australia, Warrilow said enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders can benefit from selecting a “high-quality” managed service provider when implementing and operating solutions on AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP.
Through to 2018, the cloud managed service market will remain relatively immature, and more than 75 per cent of fully successful implementations will be delivered by “highly skilled, forward-looking, boutique” managed service providers with a cloud-native, DevOps-centric service delivery approach.
In the context of a recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant report, two Australian partners were globally recognised as industry leaders in the public cloud - Bulletproof and Melbourne IT.
Among 20 businesses named in the report, key players also included Accenture, Datapipe, CSC, Cognizant, HCL Technologies, Capgemini with Melbourne IT and Bulletproof specifically recognised as challengers and niche players respectively.
“All of the multi-cloud hyper-scale managed service providers are with AWS and around half will have Azure capabilities by the end of the year,” he added. “The main work now is around getting certified on Azure but AWS is continuing to raise the bar through a very high quality certification program.
“Google is going to go after niche markets which represents an opportunity for the reseller. Do you go with the bulk that have went with AWS and are also moving to Azure, or do you leapfrog around to Google and get yourself known that way?"
“That’s an appealing option for the Australian channel because Google is making all the right noises in terms of becoming a channel friendly vendor.”
Looking ahead, the onus now shifts to Google, and its ability to transform from an internet search giant into a viable channel-centric vendor.
James Henderson is attending Google Cloud Next ’17 conference in San Francisco as a guest of Google.
