Google Cloud's Open Source Partner Deal Offers Channel Opportunities

GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT ’19 – Google has partnered with seven open source database and analytics vendors to offer Google Cloud Platform customers tightly-coupled packages to make it easier for them to use the cloud while simplifying their billing, support and other needs.

By offering the open source applications combined with Google’s cloud services and deep management capabilities, channel partners will be able to deliver the product packages to customers while increasing their revenue from a wider range of open source technologies.

The open source partnerships were announced this week at the company’s annual Google Cloud Next ’19 conference in San Francisco, where some 30,000 developers, partners, vendors and other attendees heard about the company’s latest cloud moves.

The open source vendors involved in the new managed services partnerships are Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs.

Under the program, customers will get fully-managed database and analytics services in the cloud, with performance and latency optimization between the services and applications; user interfaces that can provision and manage the services from the Google Cloud Console; unified billing that provides a single invoice from Google Cloud that includes the services from the open source partners; and direct Google Cloud support for most of the partners, allowing support tickets to be managed and logged in a single window without having to deal with multiple providers.

For users, especially those without deep experience in open source technologies, the new partnerships will help them more easily deploy open source applications that can help them while gaining flexibility and capabilities for their IT operations.

To improve the partnership services in the future, Google is continuing to work with the vendors to build additional integrations with native GCP services like Stackdriver for monitoring and Identity Access Management, while validating the services for security and optimizing performance, according to Google.

Google’s Kevin Ichhpurani

For channel partners, the new GCP offerings could make it easier to provide a broader range of open source services and applications to customers while also generating new revenue streams and a deeper relationship with Google, Kevin Ichhpurani, the company’s corporate vice president of business development, told Channel Futures.

“Ultimately, we are the channel in this particular instance and that’s what we are doing,” said Ichhpurani. “We’re the global distribution point for all the partners that you see here today.”

Under the relationships, Google’s sales team is taking the services and application offerings to customers in the market and are promoting them just like they would for typical stand-alone Google services, he said. “Our salespeople are compensated and given sales credits just like with Google products. We are also taking these offerings and enabling our channel so our services partners and the channel will be able to wrap this together and provide a complete [package] for customers.”

Ichhpurani called the new services offerings a huge opportunity for the partner community.

“Whether that’s through value-added services, or whether that’s by providing managed services, we see a huge shift in a lot of the open source companies monetizing through managed services,” he said. “What we fundamentally are doing is we’re taking a lot of these open source offerings you see and standing them up truly as a first-class offering in the cloud.”

Moor Insights’ Rhett Dillingham

Rhett  Dillingham, an IT analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told Channel Futures that

Google’s decision to tightly partner with the seven open source vendors instead of directly competing with them presents a huge incentive for the vendors to favor Google Cloud over Amazon Web Services (AWS) when guiding customer cloud choice.

“I expect their influence is limited based on the many other factors involved in cloud provider selection, but this Google decision will …

… put that to the test more than ever before,” said Dillingham. “Microsoft has a big decision to make as to whether Azure follows the AWS or Google Cloud model.”

For channel partners, the Google partnerships offer a clear long-term growth opportunity for channel partners using Google Cloud because on AWS they’d have to directly compete with AWS services, said Dillingham. “Google already partners and competes with ISV services in other software categories, including developer / DevOps services, so it is unclear as yet how far Google’s integration of joint ISV partner offers may extend to other services categories.”

451 Research’s Matt Aslett

Matt Aslett, research vice president at 451 Research, said he agrees the partnerships should open up some opportunities for the channel in the future.

“Some of those players, not all of them, have their own cloud services and some of them already run on Google Cloud, but the fact that it’s a native service and will have the same billing, same services and support it should make things a lot easier for the customers and for the partners,” said Aslett.