Channel Partners Get Green Light To Sell Google Anthos

Partners have been 'clamoring' to resell Anthos, says Carolee Gearhart, Google’s global channel chief and vice president of worldwide channel sales.

Google Cloud is revving up its Anthos hybrid and multi-cloud sales offensive with a new channel charge.

The up-and-coming cloud provider has authorized 50 partners to start reselling Anthos in early 2020, Carolee Gearhart, Google’s global channel chief and vice president of worldwide channel sales, told CRN.

“It’s part of our ongoing commitment to the channel,” she said.

Partners have been “clamoring” to resell Anthos, according to Gearhart. Unveiled at the Google Cloud Next ’19 conference in San Francisco in April, the Anthos platform allows customers to build and manage applications across environments -- in their on-premise data centers, on Google Cloud and on rival third-party clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“It’s just like this freight train that is picking up speed overall,” Gearhart said. “I see it as one of those seminal announcements, because of the ripple effect that it's had throughout the ecosystem. It has affected, more importantly, customers.”

The Google Anthos partner sales charge comes as Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is investing heavily in building out Google’s enterprise sales attack against AWS and Microsoft. Kurian has initiated a major sales restructuring that places channel partners under the Google Cloud field sales organization.

North Hollywood, Calif.-based SADA Systems, a Google Premier Partner, will be among the reseller launch partners for Anthos, and CEO Tony Safoian sees it as a differentiator for the company, which was a Google Cloud Global Reseller Partner of the Year for 2018.

“Very few partners are technologically first in being able to deliver Anthos, and now to have the credibility and the ability to actually sell it and having it in our licensing agreement when we sell the bigger packages to our customers, absolutely it's an advantage for us in the market,” Safoian said. “It also tells customers that we are on the forefront technologically to be able to deliver what is not very well understood yet by most partners."

Safoian expects Anthos sales to be a significant piece of SADA’s business going forward. Google has handled sales of Anthos directly since its launch.

“We could do some trials, but we had no way to actually sell the actual Anthos subscription license,” Safoian said. “Resale is a big part of our strategy. It just allows us to be more comprehensive in our approach to our customers. If they needed it...we have it in the bag, just like all the other Google Cloud products and Maps.”

Customer reaction to Anthos has been very positive, according to Safoian, who called it a unique value proposition and technological strategy in hybrid and multi-cloud that none of the other cloud providers offer.

“We've created two Anthos flat-rate services models, in sort of how to get started with Anthos and those next steps,” he said, noting SADA also has a close partnership with Google’s professional services organization to deliver Anthos to Google’s top customers. “It's really starting to take off.”

Anthos is a key for supporting applications that are consistent across hybrid multi-cloud environments, said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights.

“With Anthos, resellers will be able to provide clients with an important toolkit to modernize and refactor applications for the cloud between the Google Kubernetes Engine and Config Management,” Park said. “This is especially important for resellers supporting cloud migration and digital transformation opportunities.”

Gearhart, for her part, said the Anthos partner charge is about providing more products to satisfy customers’ desire for choice.

“It's really about us just continuing to enable the options for customers and making sure we have folks who are ready to jump in and deliver that in a high-quality way,” she said.