Google Cloud’s Gearhart: Partner Industry Expertise a Growth Driver

It was just over a year ago, at the Partner Summit during the Google Cloud Next show, that officials introduced Carolee Gearhart as the company’s vice president of worldwide channel sales.

Gearhart’s hiring was part of a larger revamping of the Google Cloud’s management lineup – which eventually included the hiring later in the year of longtime Oracle executive Thomas Kurian as CEO – as the cloud provider looked to compete more strongly against bigger rivals like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the fast-expanding public cloud market that IDC analysts predict will hit almost $500 billion in 2023. Under Kurian’s watch, Google Cloud is looking to quickly grow its enterprise business, and Gearhart brought with her a lot of experience in that sector, including positions with GE Digital, SAP and PeopleSoft.

Google Cloud’s Carolee Gearhart

Gearhart will deliver a keynote, Sept. 11, at the upcoming Channel Partners Evolution in Washington, D.C. She will talk about how partners can help customers in their digital transformation efforts, which includes building cloud-centric strategies. Gearhart recently spoke with Channel Futures about Google Cloud’s relationship with its channel partners, her first year with the company and what she hopes attendees will take away from her talk.

She’s also a member of our inaugural Top Gun 51, recognition given to channel executives for building and executing programs in a way that drives partner, customer and supplier success.

Channel Futures: Cloud is growing quickly, with a lot of adoption of hybrid and multiclouds. In this cloud-centric world, what do you see as the role of the channel and how is that changing?

Carolee Gearhart: It’s one of these transformational moments that you have from a market perspective. There’s clearly a tsunami coming at us in terms of the volume of business that is moving to the cloud overall, but it’s clear that it’s massive and the [total addressable market] is tremendous. Customers really are looking at that and seeing that as a particular challenge for them. There are folks who have had large enterprises that have a huge installed footprint of very customized on-prem software. Some of them have built their own data centers. PeopleSoft built its own data center. We hosted those applications in our own data center. There are folks who have that kind of environment. Then many of them have got a footprint in a cloud or two that want to hedge their bets. They’re looking at this and saying, “What will that look like for me? How do I stay agile enough? How do I make sure that I’m spending on what differentiates my company?”

I’m looking at that scenario because for a partner it’s a similar kind of thing. What they bring to the table. Great channel partners out there have deep relationships and a deep understanding of the business that they’ve been working with over the years. There’s a lot of value the partners can bring, but only to the degree that we can together establish how they take all of that DNA and that history and what they know about that customer and then help them transition into a pretty big technology leap … into a place with all of this underlying infrastructure, all of the things that Google does so well. The partners that are going to be able to talk to a customer, that they both know their landscape and can talk to them how not to become a dinosaur, [showing them], “Here’s how you can transform into the new thing while still managing your business day to day,” it makes for a much more interesting a role for the channel.

It’s also the reason why I see Google as dramatically differentiated vs. some of the others. Google has always been super proud to talk about our perspective, which has been really driven off of a combination of openness and innovation. That openness means that we believe the world is going to look more like a hybrid world. We can look and see the customers that are out there today that have this blend of environments, but even as they’re moving to the cloud, many of them do not …

… want to be beholden to a single vendor and many of them want flexibility in the way in which they’ll engage with the cloud. Google has an underlying principle. You’re not seeing us try to make the customer make binary choices. In fact, you see us innovating around saying, “How do we equipment-enable choice, so you could run in us or another cloud,” which is totally anathema for most of the other folks. We know that you may have, again, some of this legacy on-prem, so what’s Google going to bring to you? Google’s going to bring to you one management layer. There are a lot of reasons why customers have a mixed environment. A lot of it can relate to where their footprint is.

What Google brings to the table is to say, “Look, you could write your application once and then deploy it across all of these different environments. You will save yourself the overhead of the significant refactoring of the one idea that you think is a great idea you want to deliver to your customers everywhere. Instead, today they have a lot of work for, ‘How do I refactor that across a bunch of different environments?’ Google is architecting in a way to really support that. That really creates an opportunity for a channel partner to drive value to a customer, help them understand why Google is differentiated and helps the customer navigate that mixed environment. That’s really an opportunity for partners to deliver more value because I think the market trends toward choice. They want options and we’re really architecting for that.

CF: In this world, how do channel partners themselves have to adapt, and what is Google doing to help them do this?

CG: Again, hopefully it’s the DNA that they’re bringing to the table. Part of Google’s philosophy has been, we’re after the cream of the crop, the folks who are really delivering value and share our perspective on customer centricity. In that context, the partners are bringing to the table that experience and that knowledge to the customers. What Google is bringing to the table is to help them transform themselves and say, “How do we help you think about unlocking new business outcomes?”

CF: It was about a year ago that you were introduced by Google as Google Cloud’s channel chief. What’s your takeaway from your first year on the job and, looking forward, what are your priorities for the rest of the year?

CG: Walking in, I knew [Google Cloud] was fast-moving and a year later, boy, it’s fast-moving and only accelerating. I have been at a couple of places where you thought you were in these arcs of time and suddenly you get this sense of this overwhelming push behind you. We’re in that moment where customers are going from a cloud perspective and where you can’t go fast enough, and where it’s like the treadmill is moving underneath you. That is both exhausting and exhilarating. It speaks to the opportunity. Looking at that, it has become clear that …

…  when you think about a channel, it really throws down the gauntlet of what the best are going to be able to do, which is, can you run at speed? Can they stay on the treadmill? Because we’re getting so much demand from so many different directions.

The thing that is both the blessing and the challenge of being somewhere like Google is, frankly, there is so much that technology can do. That is the blessing. The challenge with that is … repeatability. You go off to the customer and it’s really like the world’s your oyster. There’s so much we have to bring the table, so we’re really focused on helping the partners get much more focused around some key priority business areas for clients that we hear about again and again and say, “Let us help train you to write a right-sized process that is a more repeatable value [proposition] and sales process that then you can run repeatedly. The great news is you can keep building. We’ve got an endless number of Lego blocks, but let us help you find that first entry point. Let’s work together to land that entry point around a customer value point of view. Where do I see that priority? That gives priority from a channel perspective.

We have that much opportunity. The issue is not that there is an opportunity; it’s around picking the best opportunities. You want what’s going to drive the most acceleration for both us and the partners out of the gate. A huge part of the role is making sure we’re communicating prioritization, that we’ve got focus and that we’re clear and transparent with partners around how we’re thinking about which customer segment, how we’re thinking about which products where, how we’re thinking about which market in terms of countries that we’re going into. How are we going to be staffing up and what does that mean for you? How do we want you to be staffing up in other places? It’s prioritization. It is total transparency and alignment. Then driving repeatability, which could create scale for both the partners and us. A lot of what is coming was actually just rolled out in January. It was training that was all focused on the use cases for customers, included sales, pre-sales, post sales … the full life cycle around some key areas. You’re going to see us bulk the partners up more around that and then talk to them about … other expansion overall. Keeping that customer-centric [focus] is super, super important.

CF: Thomas Kurian has been vocal about building the enterprise business for Google Cloud. What is the channel’s role in making this happen?

CG: That’s a great example of when I spoke about focus. It’s thinking about that particular segment of customers. By and large, my entire career experience has all been around enterprise B2B, so when you think about the largest companies on a global basis, what he’s talking is really that piece, that focus. Where partners can help is many of them have long, established relationships with those players. Typically, the partners that are in those are oftentimes also global themselves because the customer is deployed across multiple environments and wants someone who they …

… know can execute. They can build a plan once and then execute it on an international basis. Do they have a presence? Can they truly cover a customer across multiple markets?

Another way is with the vertical depth and expertise of that particular partner. Google’s expertise is really around all the innovation that we’re building. We’re building muscle around very vertical plays, but there are partners where that’s the only thing they’ve been doing. That adds a tremendous amount of value because what we’re really looking to do is complement that regular customer and contextualize it into that business context. Partners can add tremendous value around understanding the most important use cases and the leverage within a particular business. Folks who deeply know those industries are able to really inform how we architect, so we’re looking for folks who are really a trusted adviser to their customers with a long history of customer success.

CF: There’s a lot of competition in the cloud space with AWS, Azure and others. What is it about Google Cloud that would attract partners to that as opposed to your competitors? How do you separate yourself in the minds of the channel?

CG: There is a set of things. Google has the best-in-class security. Google has the largest privately maintained network in the entire world, with more than 100,000 miles of fiber-optic cable. That is twice the size of AWS or Azure. We also have a whole series of other data-protection things that we’ve got that includes sensitive data redaction with more than 90 predefined detectors, which is different than what both AWS and Azure do. There’s a whole thing around security, so depending on, again, what customer segment the partners are serving, that becomes super, super impactful to them.

Also, you heard me talk about this element of the world as hybrid cloud. That’s what partners are hearing from customers and it has to create value for them. Someone who’s all-in on one vendor, it’s increasingly difficult for the partner to add value. The partner adds value by being able to assess, manage and traverse a variety of different environments. Google is the only one that has said in our stated strategy that it will be hybrid. We expect it to be mostly cloud, and in our role, we want to enable choice, this aspect that we’ve got to write once and run anywhere, that you can have your legacy applications that are running across cloud with one management environment and that we are all-in on open source. We are the largest cloud contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and we were the creator of Kubernetes, which has been adopted across AWS and Azure. There’s no question from an operational infrastructure [perspective] that we have done better in terms of fully automated operations and part of that relates to a broader Google and what Google does around the world.

We get the ease of use, the way we scale to thousands of cores in seconds, where AWS and Azure have manual config. As to how we can optimize spend on the workload, we do that with a lot more granularity that the competitors do not. From an [artificial intelligence] perspective, there’s zero question in the market that Google has done better than anyone else in terms of innovation. [It’s] part of “why Google Cloud” relates to “why Google” overall. It is our culture of innovation and agility, that folks are looking to understand how they can …

… transform, how they can be a next-generation company the way Google is. We have a breadth of products and services. We have the broader Google. Those are reasons why just out of the gate partners are looking at us.

The ethical underpinning of Google overall is compelling to partners because it’s around transparency; it’s around doing the right thing above all. Those are things that partners want to hear. When you talk about Google’s global mission about making that information universally accessible and usable for everyone, that’s not a mission around, “This is how we make more money.” It’s around doing the right thing. Partners respond to that. Google’s attitude around transparency helped open it and it manifested in the sales cycle. It manifested in our completely neutral plan for our field organization, it manifested where we have zero services that we do outside of the enterprise, and to date, virtually 100 percent of every single job, whether it’s a Google services person on site or is a partner services person on site, there is a sense that we are not building to compete with them.

We also have great economics. Honestly, we care more about the nonfinancial benefits. The financial benefits are clear and there’s a reason to lean in on us, but financial benefits are not sufficient; in fact, we hear more about it’s the way in which we engage on the ground with partners around really looking to team with them. This comes from what Google’s culture is about and that is the way that we would work with customers and partners together. Sometimes this is the most overwhelming reason partners love to work with us.

CF: Harkening back to your talk at the upcoming Channel Partners Evolution, what would you like people to take with them from your talk?

CG: I hope that they will take away the sense that the time is now and to really look at themselves, to be able to do a little self-reflection that says, “Am I on the right side of the innovation and change curve and what that actually requires?” There is a much more foundational, cultural element to that. [I want them to] walk away saying, ‘It’s not just about what I do, it’s the underlying beliefs, values and culture that are driving our company,” because that’s going to be manifest in the execution.