Google Cloud Partner Head Colleen Kapase: ‘This Is Our Time’
Attending her first Google Cloud Next, Kapase sits down with Channel Futures to talk Google Cloud partner opportunities around generative AI, professional services and more.
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Colleen Kapase, VP of Google Cloud channels and partner programs, at Google Cloud Next '24.
Channel Futures: What’s most impactful for MSPs and VARs coming out of Google Cloud Next ‘24?
Colleen Kapase: Two things. First, Google Cloud’s been in this great growth trajectory. But the heritage of AI … is where people are seeing this is game-changing. It’s not something we started last year or the year before — it has been a decade. And when you see the chip structure we have and the relationships we have all the way through to how we're thinking about Vertex and BigQuery, it becomes evident that this is our sweet spot. This is our time. And that's what I'm hearing from partners.
CF: What’s one example of some game-changing AI work you’re seeing from partners?
CK: One of the partners at the Partner Award ceremony — Slalom — had a robotic dog with a camera, all powered by Google Cloud and Google AI. It can "see" and is crawling through one of the major retailers in the middle of the night doing supply chain management and inventory with 95% accuracy. Humans are at 97%. This is like a movie. It's amazing. And this is going to stop the need for having employees coming in at 4 a.m. and doing things like inventory management, and instead be able to focus on selling and be customer-facing.
That's so cool. … You see their creativity building on our creativity. … It's a higher-order set of [partner] organizations bringing a level of creativity that not just taking the playbook and rewriting it. … That level of creativity is rare and I think this next journey is all about that creativity.
CF: Let’s talk about the new generative AI specialization Google Cloud just introduced. What’s significant there?
CK: We co-developed it with about 10 of our top partners — Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, Quantiphi and others — to really get the content at the ‘400’ level, if you will. We already have content, boot camps and challenge labs to bring folks up [to speed], but we also want to have a designation for partners who are really at the expert level. These are the highest-qualified AI experts in our ecosystem. So that's coming out here shortly and it’s been great. Partners are very much [looking forward to] a hands-on experience … with our partner engineering staff.
CF: What’s next (pardon the pun) that Google Cloud partners need to know?
CK: We’re also announcing something I'm honestly really excited about. It's a bit of an eat-your-own-dog-food situation, which there's a lot of here at Google. So one of the challenges that I see is Google does a massive investment in our partner ecosystem in different ways — the traditional rebates, development dollars, offsetting the cost of partners delivering professional services. It’s in a lot of different pockets and a lot of different places. What I find is that it's difficult for our partner leaders to get together and say, "Hey, how do I determine the total investment I've gotten from Google Cloud?"
The answer is that we're going to have a dashboard coming out where a partner can use natural language to say, "Let me see all of my rebates for my company from Google. Let me see it by country. Let me see it by Workspace versus cloud, by product areas. Let me see the services funds." This will bring it all together, using AI. I've never experienced that in my career. That's interesting.
It will also tell them, if you're at lower partner level and would like to get up to premier, [how to do that]. What we're learning and seeing now is there're a lot partners who are multi-country, multi-region, multi-continent, and may be premier in one place [and lower] in another.
I think this is going to be a game-changer. It launches officially in July.
CF: Let’s talk about another big piece of news, the general availability of the Delivery Navigator Portfolio.
CK: It’s available to all of our qualified services partners. And it's built by our Google Cloud Consulting organization, [our] professional services organization. All of the IP that the Google Cloud Consulting organization has put together for every project … [will now be shared with partners]. We’re not a large professional services organization compared to the revenue and opportunity out there. That's why it's so imperative that we deliver this message to partners, that we need [partners'] services expertise, now, by industry. I don't know if I've seen a company be so transparent and share so much of its professional services IP in my career, ever.
That’s the biggest message that we're delivering to partners, that all of us are transforming. It's all got to change. And what I see is that a bet on Google and that services opportunity, the payoff is 10 times larger than what we've been doing. And with the education tools, with the professional services tools, with bringing AI within our own systems to make things easier …. I think that's going to give us an edge as well.
CF: Switching gears a little bit. There’s a statistic running around that the average tenure of a channel leader lasts about two-and-a-half years. You’ve just started at Google Cloud — what are your thoughts on longevity there?
CK: I was at four-and-a-halfyears for Snowflake and I was 10-12 years at VMware. So if I find the right playground, I try to stay there. There's a lot to learn as a partner leader. … There’s a paper out there by Ross Brown, someone I've worked with before, that a channel chief is actually a bit like a mini-CEO. You're working with almost every single entity in a company — product, sales, marketing, finance, IT, and that's what I love about the role. … I fell in love [with the channel] as an intern, if you can believe it, in college. It’s just stimulating. It's challenging. And I love doing different things.
CF: Switching gears a little bit. There’s a statistic running around that the average tenure of a channel leader lasts about two-and-a-half years. You’ve just started at Google Cloud — what are your thoughts on longevity there?
CK: I was at four-and-a-halfyears for Snowflake and I was 10-12 years at VMware. So if I find the right playground, I try to stay there. There's a lot to learn as a partner leader. … There’s a paper out there by Ross Brown, someone I've worked with before, that a channel chief is actually a bit like a mini-CEO. You're working with almost every single entity in a company — product, sales, marketing, finance, IT, and that's what I love about the role. … I fell in love [with the channel] as an intern, if you can believe it, in college. It’s just stimulating. It's challenging. And I love doing different things.
GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT — Colleen Kapase’s energy and excitement around Google Cloud partner opportunities are palpable.
This week, Kapase attended Google Cloud Next for the first time — and as the newly installed vice president of channels and partner programs (she succeeded Bronwyn Hastings late last year).
Kapase, who has worked in the technology indirect channel since 2001, sees a shift in the sector that is bringing Google Cloud partners a slew of new chances to grow and thrive. Primarily, those opportunities stem from AI, an area where Google Cloud has focused for more than 10 years. Kapase discussed this with Channel Futures in March as she talked about why she joined Google Cloud.
“[W]hen I looked at the resources that Google Cloud can bring to bear, that was something I wanted to be a part of,” she said. “… It was more just seeing the opportunity in front of us and knowing the culture of Google from a diversity perspective, a partner-first mentality. I was all-in. But the AI piece was probably the inflection point for me.”
While AI seemed to come out of nowhere at the beginning of 2023, the reality is that most of the vendors launching it have put in extensive effort behind the scenes for some time. Google Cloud represents one of those companies, and its expertise is coming to fruition in a variety of ways. Consider the introduction this week of Google Vids as just one example. The new Workspace tool lets anyone create videos with features including preset voiceovers. Google Vids “helps you become a better storyteller with a rich, new medium,” Aparna Pappu, vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, said during the April 9 keynote session.
But there's more that has Kapase fired up for opportunities with Google Cloud partners.
First up, Google Cloud this week announced its new Generative AI Services Specialization. This certification targets Google Cloud partners at a certain (high) level of technical proficiency. Achieving it will “unlock earlier access to Google-led gen AI projects, additional funding for gen AI assessment work, and increased access to AI resources, partner marketing funds, and more,” as Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of global partner ecosystem and channels, wrote in an April 9 blog. Find out in the slideshow above what Kapase has to say about the new curriculum.
In addition, Google Cloud partners received some welcome news around professional services this week. While some cloud providers compete against their channel partners in this arena, Google Cloud is not one of them. Following on its announcement last August, Google Cloud on Wednesday said its Delivery Navigator expertise now is generally available to services partners.
“Delivery Navigator, a combination of Google’s technology and implementation methodologies, started as an internal platform designed to help Google Cloud Consulting customers transform, create and innovate on Google Cloud,” Brad Little, vice president, global head of cloud professional services, explained in an April 10 blog. “After an initial private preview of the platform to our partner community last year, we are ready to open up Delivery Navigator to the rest of our qualifying partners that have at least one Partner Specialization.”
Kapase talks about that and more in our Q&A (note that we have lightly edited the transcript for clarity and length). Learn what Google Cloud partners will want to know.
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