CloudWerx On Google Cloud’s ‘Powerful’ New Licensing, Pricing

‘This gives folks the access to dip their toes into the water and truly embrace a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach through spinning up more individual workloads,’ says Betsy Reed, co-founder, vice president and CRO of Google Cloud partner CloudWerx.

Google Cloud’s new Flex Agreements, which now allow customers to migrate their workloads to the cloud with no up-front commitments, are creating new customer opportunities for channel partners while also helping businesses avoid cloud vendor lock-in.

“The Flex Agreements and flexible pricing show us that Google is saying, ‘Hey, we don’t want vendor lock-in. We want you to use us where you need us and not feel locked into a commitment because you need to meet some commercial terms for your business,’” said Betsy Reed, co-founder, vice president and CRO for fast-growing Google Cloud partner CloudWerx. “That’s a really a powerful position to be in. That’s a position of strength.”

As part of Google’s new licensing option, customers can still get access to Google Cloud incentives such as monthly spending discounts and cloud credits. In addition, the $29 billion cloud giant recently unveiled three new cloud package pricing editions: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

Reed said Google Cloud’s new pricing and flexible options will better enable businesses to embrace a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy.

“This gives folks the access to dip their toes into the water and truly embrace a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach through spinning up more individual workloads,” she said.

CloudWerx

CloudWerx is a fast-growing cloud consulting startup that has already achieved Google Cloud’s Premier Partner status, while also recently achieving Google’s Infrastructure Services Specialization.

Founded in 2020, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is an all-in Google Cloud partner that already has more than 200 customers along with a 100 percent customer retention rate. The company has an engineering focus that operates on the cloud and aims to solve complex cloud environments at scale. CloudWerx is working hand-in-hand with Google Cloud on creating new solutions, working with joint customers, getting offerings on the Google Cloud Marketplace and much more.

In an interview with CRN, Reed explains the significance of Google Cloud’s new Flex Agreements, some hot Google products in the market today and CloudWerx’s cloud optimization strategy.

What is the significance of Google Cloud’s new Flex Agreements?

The Flex Agreements and flexible pricing show us that Google is saying, ‘Hey, we don’t want vendor lock-in. We want you to use us where you need us and not feel locked into a commitment because you need to meet some commercial terms for your business.’

That’s a really a powerful position to be in. That’s a position of strength.

For us, we don’t have too many long-term commitments with our customers. If they would like to go into a long-term commitment, of course we’re open to that. But we want folks to stay and be on our team and partner with us because they want to.

So I see the flex pricing as more access.

It gives different sorts of benefits, discounts and access to Google’s cloud that some companies may have seen as prohibitive based on where they were at. That’s really what we get excited about as a partner because they say, ‘We’re willing to do our best to put our hat in the ring and deliver a ton of value and to help our customers accelerate.’ Google Cloud is always looking to push the needle and understand how they can have commercial terms that are going to support that motion.

What type of customers will these Flex Agreements attract? SMBs?

In terms of the Flex Agreements, I don’t think it’s relegated to one segment because if you want to dip the toe into the water—say, you’re all on-premises but you’re a large organization, or you have AWS or an Azure environment—you can now try some workloads that you believe Google’s solution might be best suited for.

If a partner prompts you that Flex [Agreements] might be something you should approach based on optimization or based on features, functionality and so forth—this gives folks the access to dip their toes into the water and truly embrace a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach through spinning up more individual workloads. That’s how I see it.

I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be relegated to one market segment just based on pricing alone or the flexible spend. … This is a bold statement to the market around selecting the right cloud, the right place [for workloads] and the right solution for your business.

What are some hot Google Cloud products right now for CloudWerx customers?

Looker for Google Cloud is definitely one. We’re a resale partner of Looker as well. We’re a Workspace reseller service partner too so we understand how to help and support productivity and collaboration in a more intentional way.

Other hot products right now include Compute Engine, BigQuery, Kubernetes—those are the areas where we really excel in terms of our special services, workshops and then the engineering services we provide. We service AI, ML, big data engineering projects to support customers as they scale and accelerate. So AI and machine learning are some of the engineering-focused areas where we help highly regulated industries like health care, FinTech and so forth.

But in terms of the other products we win with—it’s a business solutions mindset versus a product mindset.

We’re not saying, ‘Hey, here’s BigQuery. Here’s why you should use it.’ We start the conversation, ‘What’s your cloud journey? Where are you at today? Where do you need to be? What kind of cloud environment, if any, do you have?’ We meet with executives at that level, folks in engineering, in finance and in operations to really get a full picture of that cloud journey. Then we map the products and offerings that are solutions-oriented to that versus coming with a product-first approach.

How is CloudWerx helping customers cut or optimize cloud costs as they are top of mind for many businesses in 2023?

We’ve actually created some pretty interesting and exciting tooling around that. We call it ‘business optimization’ because it’s not just about cutting costs. It’s about understanding where there might be redundancies or where there might be opportunity to take dollars you’re spending in an area where you might have grown too fast and might have different services spun up due to moving quickly and getting something to market that we can now go back in and identify where we can reroute those funds to get more [optimization].

CloudWerx in conjunction with the amazing teams at Google, we’ve launched a FinOps workshop that we will be providing to all of our customers. It includes a Looker dashboard that shows their spend across GCP [Google Cloud Platform] and also across AWS, and spots opportunities to optimize that spend to put it into different areas to cut those costs. We’re about to launch it in a larger fashion at the beginning of the second quarter.

That’s a direct response to us knowing this was coming down the pipeline.

It’s awesome that now we’re ready to act because we’ve been developing this tool and these capabilities for the last two and a half years. So being able to bring that to market with the utilization of Google Looker to our customers and to the channel as a tool to support customers in this macroeconomic climate is something we’re super excited about. We’re honored to be able to support businesses as they go through this phase.

What are your thoughts on Google Cloud’s future and current market standing?

There’s no hiding the fact that that Google Cloud is still third in the market. They’re in third place, but I love the fact that Google Cloud is the fastest-growing as of the end of last year.

That’s a big message to the market on what we’re doing as partners, what Google’s doing in terms of their products and solutions and offerings.

When we talk about things like price increases or different types of commercial terms—it’s really about let’s reframe the conversation to value-adds. Google is the most secure platform. They do have the most native security features and offer such an incredibly flexible and agile platform that most customers today—depending on workloads and solutions—should be utilizing to some extent.

Everyone’s taking a much closer look at the business value to the customer, as opposed to selling a thing. For example, ‘Here’s the thing I have. Here’s my product that I’m going to sell to you.’ It’s really now about starting with, ‘What are the business challenges that you have? What are the challenges and problems you have today? And what are you going to have in three or six or 12 months?’ It’s about understanding the cloud journey or the technical evolution of the company.

The value CloudWerx is providing and delivering to Google Cloud customers is really more business-solutions-focused.

Google was always committed to being business-solutions-focused as one of the most friendly cloud platforms. They play well with all folks and understand multi-cloud and hybrid cloud is really important as customers make that transformative journey into cloud. The future is really bright.