Rhody Burton (Google Cloud)
Cost saving and reinvestment activities within the business landscape represent prime opportunities for cloud partners in the current climate, according to Google Cloud’s head of partnerships and alliances in Australia and New Zealand Rhody Burton.
“One of the things we’re finding more and more, especially because of COVID-19, is that a lot of companies are trying to save money at the moment,” Burton told ARN. “So, what we’re finding is a number of our partners are really building out offerings that are helping to take cost out of organisations, quite frankly.
“And we’re finding that there is a lot of opportunity right now where organisations are looking for help around that. Where we’re potentially finding cost savings for customers, it’s about how we help them reinvest some of those savings into things that are going to make a difference to the business through innovation, and that’s where a lot of our partners are also looking,” she added.
Along with cost saving and reinvestment, certain industry verticals are relatively hot right now, in terms of opportunity, with financial services being among the top contenders, at least for Google Cloud partners.
At the same time, unique intellectual property (IP) around solutions is a major source of value and opportunity for partners in the market.
“From a market perspective, financial services is definitely a strong industry for us,” Burton said. “We see a lot of retailers wanting to talk to Google.
“I think the biggest opportunity is, if you are an organisation that has a unique offering or IP, or if you can help customers by industry, that’s the huge opportunity we’re seeing. How do you take the skills around our products and wrap that around what you’re taking to industry? That’s a huge opportunity at the moment,” she said.
Rhody’s comments come as Google Cloud releases sponsored research by industry analysis firm IDC that suggests Google Cloud partners in Australia and New Zealand can expect to generate US$6.66 in revenue for every US$1 of Google Cloud products sold, increasing to US$7.39 by 2025.
According to IDC, the Google Cloud partner opportunity in ANZ will increase by more than two times by 2025.
Broadly, the IDC paper suggested that, on a global basis, partner revenue from Google Cloud opportunities is expected to more than triple over the next five years as the cloud market continues to evolve beyond lift-and-shift engagements to cloud-based solutions that address business outcomes.
On a more local level, Burton expects to see no small amount of growth for Google Cloud over the coming months and years. And the company’s partner network in the A/NZ region is playing a major role in that growth which, according to Burton, will be reflected in the growth of partners’ businesses themselves, delivered by value-heavy offerings.
“We’re very pleased with the ecosystem that we’ve built [in A/NZ],” Burton said. “We were definitely on a phase of recruitment, probably until even late last year. Success for me is about building an ecosystem that is really based on value, not volume.”
