Forrester: Google Cloud Partners See Big Success Since 2016

With apologies in advance for the Google overload, get the lowdown on some of the hotter cloud activity impacting the channel in North America and Europe over the past few days.

Forrester: Google Cloud Partners Showing Notable Growth

Forrester Research has released the results of the Total Economic Impact study it recently conducted on behalf of Google Cloud to analyze the channel partner business opportunity.

The findings build on those Forrester first uncovered for Google Cloud Platform in 2016. Since that initial report, partners report an increase in average deal size for GCP migration of three to six times. Cloud modernization and application development deal sizes on GCP have grown three to five times since 2016, Forrester said.

In terms of Google Cloud partner revenue, approximately 70% comes from professional and managed services, according to Forrester.

“Professional-service project gross margins ranged from a low of 25% to a high of 60% across the 19 interviewees, with higher margins associated with higher value analytics, AI/ML, cloud modernization and cloud-native application development projects,” analysts wrote. “Lastly, partners that built their own custom intellectual property on or for Google Cloud solutions were able to sell these offerings to customers, often attaching them to larger cloud engagements and earning margins in excess of 60%.”

That strategy of moving from selling existing Google Cloud services to offering custom solution on GCP results in “a larger total addressable market and higher margins,” Forrester noted.

In a Feb. 6 blog, Carolee Gearhart, channel chief at Google Cloud, agreed with that assessment.

“We know that it’s still early days for cloud migration across industries, but a few key product areas stood out as opportunities for partners – particularly, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and building custom intellectual property,” Gearhart said. “Customer engagements in these areas are leading to repeat business and larger contract values for partners, Forrester found, so building expertise can help ‘further bolster partners’ value proposition and differentiation in the marketplace.'”

Indeed, Forrester listed the following areas as the “big opportunities” for partners:

Continuing to expand in all those domains stands to culminate in further partner differentiation and success, Forrester predicted.

Forrester took several steps to evaluate the business impact of building a Google Cloud practice; approaches included interviews with Forrester analysts, Google stakeholders and 19 Google Cloud partners.

Kaddaras Leading Channel Sales for Nutanix

Nutanix has promoted Chris Kaddaras to executive vice president of global sales.

Kaddaras now leads several key sales efforts for …

… the enterprise cloud computing vendor, including channel, inside, technical and OEM sales and sales operations.

Nutanix’s Chris Kaddaras

“I’m looking forward to helping take Nutanix through our next phase of growth,” Kaddaras said.

Kaddaras joined Nutanix three-and-a-half years ago with nearly 30 years of experience. He started at Nutanix as vice president and head of EMEA. Then, in 2018, he took on the position of senior vice president and general manager. Last year, Nutanix named him senior vice president of sales for the Americas.

“[Chris] has been instrumental in our shift to software and subscription, while keeping customer satisfaction high,” Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Nutanix, said. “His unique blend of business acumen and sales discipline will help us grow.”

Prior to Nutanix, Kaddaras spent 16 years at EMC Corp.

Kaddaras’s new title took effect on Feb. 1.

Atos Wraps Maven Wave Purchase

Paris-based Atos, an IT consulting and outsourcing services firm, has closed its acquisition of Chicago-headquartered Maven Wave, an MSP and Google Cloud premier partner.

The companies announced the deal at the first of the year. They didn’t disclose financial terms.

Atos targeted Maven Wave to expand its competency around delivering cloud-native, serverless applications managed in Kubernetes environments hosted in Google Cloud Platform, as well as to extend its presence in the United States, as Channel Futures reported in January. Atos kicked off its U.S. strategy with the purchase of Michigan’s Syntel in 2018.

Maven Wave’s 330 employees join the Atos roster of 110,000 staff around the world. Maven Wave holds 10 Google specializations, and in 2019 and 2018, earned the title of Google Cloud North America Services Partner of the Year.