CRN Exclusive: New Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program Launches

Google Cloud’s revamped partner program and portal have gone live with the intent of making it easier for partners to engage with the company and better highlight their expertise to customers.

The newly named Google Cloud Partner Advantage program consolidates 16 partner programs under one umbrella and will trigger Google Cloud’s first recruitment efforts to increase its partner ecosystem, according to Nina Harding, chief of global partner strategy and programs.

New Google Cloud chief executive officer Thomas Kurian has been recharging the No. 3 cloud provider, which trails No. 1 Amazon Web Services and No. 2 Microsoft Azure, since he formally took the reins this year with a vow to increase investments in channel programs and sales.

"We're over 13,000 partners today, and we have not been proactively recruiting," Harding told CRN. "With the launch of Partner Advantage, it's the first time we're going to start turning on some of those recruitment engines."

The program focuses on six industries aligned with Kurian’s enterprise push -- financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, the public sector and communications, media and entertainment. And it focuses on five solution areas -- infrastructure, data management, business analytics, packaged applications, and productivity and work transformation.

"There's a single point of entry into the program versus all these different engagement points," Harding said. "Our core tenets of the program were really around creating a simplified approach to partnering focused on helping the partners differentiate themselves to customers."

Google Cloud has trained new partner advisors that will be assigned to every partner to help them navigate their business with Google, and it’s introducing new expertises based on products/technology, priority workloads and industry.

"We've removed the friction, we've simplified the contracting and the engagement, and we will have this one partner advisor that will guide you through all of that," Harding said.

The program has three engagement models: for partners that want to sell by collaborating with Google Cloud sales or integrating Google offerings into their portfolio; for services partners that want to provide consulting and integration services, and transform and manage customer applications and workloads, or provide Google Cloud authorized training; and for partners focused on building their own product and running it on Google Cloud Platform, building an extension for a Google Cloud product or integrating their existing product with a Google Cloud product.

"A partner now joins based on their behavior -- what do they want to do with Google?" Harding said. "We're not artificially creating guardrails around them."

Google Cloud initially worked with research firm IDC to help build the program.

The cloud provider had several good guiding principles from the start, according to Steve White, IDC’s vice president of channels and alliances.

"The first one was…being customer-centric around everything they did," White said. "So that's the sense check for everything -- make sure that there's value to customers."

Google Cloud also wanted to ensure the program was flexible for partners and made it easier for those who work with the cloud provider across different areas. It also wanted partners to have a good experience with Google at all stages.

"They want to be 100 percent through partners, and that's a big aspiration," White said. "(They) want 100 percent partner attach to all of (their) partner deals."

Vanessa Simmons, vice president of business development at Toronto-based Pythian, sees the redesigned program as evidence of Google Cloud’s market traction and the further evolution of its partner adoption.

"Every effort by a large vendor such as Google Cloud to simplify processes, administration, logistics or engagement for partners is always better," said Simmons, whose company is an information technology consultant, managed service provider and Google Premier Partner. "The program is built so that, if, for example, we want to sell eventually, it’s quick and easy to figure out what that means for us. Everything is in one place at our fingertips -- benefits we have access to, all of our partner-related info and tracking (for) our influenced projects, specializations, our certifications, etc."

Asked about changes in partner compensation in terms of margins, Harding said there were "little tweaks here and there."

"We are as competitive, if not better, on our margins," she said. "That we can definitely validate out there."