Credit: Google Cloud
Google Cloud has launched a new Premium Support service aimed at serving the enterprise and mission-critical needs of end Google Cloud customers.
In the words of Google Cloud vice president, cloud support, Atul Nanda, the new offering includes a set of services and systems to serve the enterprise and mission-critical needs of Google Cloud customers.
“We’re building upon our current technical account manager (TAM) service and 15-minute SLOs [service-level objectives] to add a more proactive approach and an improved overall experience,” Nanda said in a blog post published on 16 January.
Among other things, Premium Support features technical account management, which gives end users the ability to work with a Google Cloud TAM -- a technical advisor, basically -- who is focused on “operational rigor and platform health,” according to Nanda.
In addition to 15-min issue resolution SLOs for Priority 1 (P1) cases, the new offering also features ‘context-aware expertise’ that can monitor and resolve issues with support staff who are already familiar with a business’s systems and third-party technology support for providing help to set up, configure and troubleshoot third-party systems.
While it appears, on the face of it, that at least a few of the features included in the new offering are likely to bleed into portions of the remit covered by many partners, a Google Cloud spokesperson said that partners can in fact resell the Premium Support service to their end customers.
The spokesperson told ARN that the vendor has already unveiled the new offering to a group of partners and plans to more broadly engage with the ecosystem over the next few days.
According to Atul, one of the ideas behind Google’s move to launch Premium Support is to help bring consistency between the support plans for Google Cloud Platform and G Suite. It is also intended to provide a more competitive set of features and services, and simplified pricing compared to the previous Google Cloud support offerings.
Moreover, the new offering is aimed at incorporating intelligent systems, such as third-party technology support and Support API, along with enterprise-class services and “customer context-aware” interactions.
“As a Premium Support customer, you’ll have your cases handled directly by context-aware experts who understand your unique application stack, architecture, and implementation details,” Nanda said.
“This team will work hand-in-hand with your technical account manager to deliver a customer-centric support experience with faster case resolution, more personalised service, and higher customer satisfaction,” Nanda added.
Moreover, Google Cloud is also offering other advanced services that can be purchased as add-ons if desired. These include an advanced event management service for deeper architecture review and increased readiness for peak events.
Also on offer as an add-on is expanded technical account manager coverage for companies with global operations that need technical account manager guidance in multiple time zones.
Additionally, end users can also purchase mission-critical support, a service that is currently in pilot with customers and will be made available later this year. This service offers an site reliability engineering engagement, which evaluates and helps the end users design a “wrapper of supportability” around the Google Cloud customer projects that have the highest sensitivity to downtime.
“The process interlocks that we build with the customer allow us to jointly respond to major incidents using predefined war rooms,” Nanda said.
Article updated on 16 January to include commentary and additional information from a representative for Google Cloud.
