SADA Adds MSP to Google Cloud Partner Practice

SADA Systems is expanding what it can do with Google Cloud Platform, becoming an MSP partner with the major cloud services provider.

The business and technology consultancy firm, which put all its chips on its relationship with Google in March when it sold its long-running Microsoft business to cloud services provider Core BTS, reached Google Cloud MSP Partner status this week, adding to a practice that already touches on the entire Google Cloud portfolio, including G Suite and its Anthos platform for running Google Cloud applications in customer data centers.

SADA also has offerings around Google’s Maps, Chrome, Cloud Search and machine-learning solutions.

The MSP designation through the Google Cloud Partner Program is an important step for SADA as more enterprises migrate workloads and data into the public cloud. It’s also a key move for Google Cloud. Thomas Kurian, the ex-Oracle executive who late last year became Google Cloud’s CEO, has put gaining more enterprise customers a key part of his growth plan for the cloud service provider. And SADA has them, including Colgate-Palmolive, Media News Group, Marriott and the State of Arizona.

SADA Systems’ Tony Safoian

“Professional services in cloud is obviously very important,” SADA CEO Tony Safoian told Channel Futures. “We need to help customers get to GCP [Google Cloud Platform], certainly with a couple of workloads to kind of prove the case in the beginning. But it also speaks to the importance of the ongoing love and support customers need to reach maximum benefit by virtue of being on Google Cloud. For that, an MSP-type engagement model makes sense, where we’re not only providing technical support but also technical account management, road map, guidance on new initiatives and new things they want to leverage from the platform as they move more and more of the workloads they have in the other clouds or in traditional data centers to GCP.”

Carolee Gearhart, global channel chief and vice president of worldwide channel sales for Google Cloud, touted SADA’s people, tools, processes and customer support that help customers get the most out of Google Cloud.

SADA, named Google Cloud Global Partner of the Year for 2018, and a Google Cloud Premier Partner, has been a Google partner since 2006, embracing increasing numbers of Google capabilities for its business over the years. The company, which has about 170 employees and six offices in North America, is in its fourth year as a Google Cloud partner, and Safoian said he expects it will become SADA’s largest business this year, growing about four times what it was in 2018.

“We see it hitting its stride,” the CEO said. “Last year and this year are sort of a breakout moment in GCP for us and for the market as well.”

Google Cloud is pushing to compete in the fast-growing public cloud services market, where it is in third place behind the dominant Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. According to analysts with Synergy Research Group, spending on cloud infrastructure services in the first quarter jumped 42% – to more than $21 billion – over the same period a year earlier. Google Cloud – along with Azure, Alibaba and Tencent – all saw first-quarter revenues grow 70% or more.

Kurian wants Google Cloud to expand its presence in the enterprise to better compete with AWS, Azure and …

… others — and the effort will be good for partners, Safoian said.

“Thomas Kurian’s strategy about greatly expanding the footprint of the sales organization and just resourcing enterprise accounts with more experienced people in the field is just great for account-penetration purposes,” he said. “It actually helps us that Google is opening doors. … But on an ongoing basis, once the deal is made and they’re starting to get traction, [Kurian’s] strategy is also to help Google scale by enabling partners to come in and do a lot of the heavy lifting after the initial commitments are made by the customer.”

Safoian called it a “divide-and-conquer strategy. For us, being that Google Cloud is all we do, we’re ready to help with the co-selling with Google in the field and partnering with the Google’s own engineering team, [professional sales organization] and whoever it is that’s servicing [the customer]. Even the largest accounts provide unique value that only a partner can get over the long term.”

That includes helping enterprises manage the increasingly complex cloud environment, particularly at a time when more businesses are adopting multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

“All the public cloud providers continue to release enhancement tools and new capabilities and new offerings,” he said. “That’s challenging for anyone to keep up with, so the role of partners – especially in managing engagements – is to make sure we’re always bringing forth the latest and greatest thinking, whether it’s best practices or strategies or use cases that the customer might be using for their particular application based on what the innovation curve looks like.”