Google Cloud Partner Advice From Kevin Ichhpurani: Go Deep

‘We will share our demand signals so that partners know where to build, what countries, what industries, what solutions and workloads,’ says Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of Google Cloud’s global ecosystem and channels.

Kevin Ichhpurani has a key piece of advice to Google Cloud partners: Go deep when it comes to building solution expertise and industry capabilities.

Customer buying patterns have moved beyond seeking cost savings from lifting and shifting workloads to the cloud to digital innovation agendas that require a rethinking of business processes or reinventing business models altogether, said Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of Google Cloud’s global ecosystem and channels.

“That means that you need to have deep industry expertise and business process expertise, because you’re now helping both the line of business as well as IT,” Ichhpurani told CRN. “That’s a big shift, and you need to build the skills to be able to enable this next generation of opportunity.”

Google Cloud last week said it was combining its ecosystem and channel sales teams into one partner organization to streamline its go-to-market efforts as it pledges to double its partner spending over the next two to three years. Ichhpurani is now overseeing the combined organization.

The demand for services around Google Cloud is “exploding,” according to Ichhpurani, and the No. 3 cloud provider is taking a partner-led approach to delivering services with a stated goal of 100 percent partner attachment to all sales deals and professional engagements.

“Scaling capacity dramatically will be very important, and we will share our demand signals so that partners know where to build, what countries, what industries, what solutions and workloads,” Ichhpurani said. “The granularity of what customers expect is getting higher and higher every day. Having very deep expertise in areas like data and analytics, around database, around security, around app modernization is very important. As customers are moving their workloads to the cloud, they’re now starting to modernize, which means everything from what’s the portfolio rationalization to how do I build a cloud modern architecture for those applications. How do I infuse intelligence in those applications using analytics and ML (machine learning)? This is where the future is headed.”