Deloitte Ramps Up Google Cloud Partnership To Support SAP Migrations

‘Most clients are looking for skin in the game from the partner community and the technology partner, so…we've put our resources to bear to be able to do that for clients in a much more scaled way,’ says Tom Galizia, Deloitte Consulting’s senior technology partner and lead commercial partner for its Alphabet/Google alliance.

Deloitte Consulting is ramping up its Google Cloud partnership with new solutions targeting large-scale SAP workload migrations in a global “major market thrust.”

It's part of a much more concerted SAP effort in the enterprise space under Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, now that the cloud provider has gone through multiple certification processes that allow it to scale SAP instances to market-leading sizes, according to Tom Galizia, Deloitte’s senior technology partner and lead commercial partner for its Alphabet/Google alliance.

Deloitte is a launch partner for Google Cloud’s Cloud Acceleration Program, an evolution of its Lighthouse program launched this year with systems integrators to streamline customers’ SAP data and application migrations to the cloud.

“We will jointly invest in clients in a much more material way,” Galizia told CRN yesterday in London, prior to the start of the Google Cloud Next ’19 UK conference. “Anything that might be a potential hindrance for a client considering doing it -- or if they want an articulated proof point, both technically and/or if there's a business transformation agenda -- we now collectively have created a pool of investments so we can go into that client and actually prove it out. Most clients are looking for skin in the game from the partner community and the technology partner, so…we've put our resources to bear to be able to do that for clients in a much more scaled way.”

Deloitte has launched “Reimagine Everything… Anywhere,” a portfolio of SAP cloud services enabled by Google Cloud that includes best practices to accelerate SAP S/4 transformation and an SAP-specific, application programming interface library on Apigee for SAP-to-anywhere integration. Deloitte also is embracing TensorFlow and BigQuery to provide intelligent applications powered by Google Cloud machine learning and advanced data insight.

The push will be global, according to Galizia.

“It is very targeted at specific countries with specific clients and specific SAP workloads that we want to go after together, because we feel that Google, from a technology perspective, is well-positioned to be successful there,” he said. “Now that they've got those certifications, we're really able to go into financial services, life sciences, core manufacturing in terms of heavy engineering orientation, where there's heavy reliance on your infrastructure and the analytic capabilities.”

Accenture, Atos and HCL also are partners in the Cloud Acceleration Program along with Capgemini, DXC Technologies, Hitachi oXya, Infosys, NTT, TCS and Wipro.

Deloitte’s Google Cloud Relationship

A Google Premier Partner, Deloitte formed a strategic alliance with Google Cloud in 2017.

“It's been a rapid, ramping enterprise-ready experience,” Galizia said. “In the early innings, the coverage model wasn't as great. (Former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene's) legacy was putting in place these technical underpinnings that now Thomas and his leadership team are taking advantage of. It's been a whole different day. Look at the velocity (with which) he's brought in senior leaders from every major company you can imagine that are enterprise-grade.”

Galizia pointed to Kurian’s hiring of Robert Enslin, Google Cloud president of global customer operations, from SAP; John Jester, vice president of global customer operations, from Microsoft; and Chris Ciauri, president of Google Cloud for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, from Salesforce.

“The people we're interfacing with are three-decade-old, two-decade-old, enterprise-grade executives,” Galizia said. “They really understand how to manage the space and manage partners or leverage partners.”

Deloitte also is strengthening its Google Cloud relationship with new solutions for procurement spending optimization for enterprises, and the storage and sharing of data to improve biomedical and clinical research, and a commercial property database platform for property insurers.

The collaboration “combines Deloitte’s expertise in business transformation with Google Cloud’s leading cloud technologies in areas like AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning) and analytics to deliver transformative solutions to our joint customers,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud’s global ecosystem vice president.

CognitiveSpend

Deloitte and Google Cloud are rolling out CognitiveSpend, a new AI-powered solution to help supply chain-reliant companies’ finance and procurement teams gain visibility into their third-party spending and rapidly identify cost savings.

The new cloud-native app, launched in beta earlier this year, is targeted at enterprise clients.

“Fortune 500 clients are constantly trying to understand that spend better, manage that spend and identify opportunities for cost savings,” Galizia said. “If you're a global company, and you've got multiple parts of your business that are buying from the same place, and you haven't pulled that information together to figure out how do you take advantage of your buyer power…from a pricing perspective, when you look over the history of different contracts, you can do better. You can do better by leaning towards one vendor versus another, or you can use contractual data to go back to a vendor and ask for a more market-competitive pricing scenario.”

Data And Biomedical And Clinical Research

Deloitte also has developed solutions to more easily store, analyze and share large biomedical and clinical research data sets at the exabyte scale.

The solutions, which run on Google Cloud Platform and leverage Google Cloud’s Healthcare API (application programming interface), AI, ML and analytics, answer Google Cloud’s call for partners to develop differentiated offerings in industry verticals, Galizia said.

“(This) a combination of government, public sector and life sciences coming together,” he said. “It's a significant partnership that involves elements of the Alphabet family.”

Galizia declined to name the other Alphabet companies involved. Alphabet, which owns Google, also owns Verily Life Sciences and Calico Life Sciences in the healthcare space.

“At the highest level, it's about solving diseases faster,” Galizia said. “We research a disease, and that data sits, in many cases, in silos in organizations. This is actually providing a platform that allows access to, in a compliant way, that data and research, and allows collaborators to better collaborate.”

Property Insurers Solution

Deloitte and Google are creating a new AI-driven platform to help property insurers view data on commercial properties around the world and better conduct risk assessments.

Using third-party, open data and Google Cloud technologies, the solution will create a digital footprint of commercial properties to help insurers in underwriting.

“What (Google has) with Maps, what they have with a variety of different data sets that are available, you can actually do better assessing of commercial real estate that way, than if you were to have a much more limited set of data repositories that you are tapping into to do that evaluation,” Galizia said. “With Google Earth, you have visibility from the top-down on what's going on, and that gets refreshed with certain cycle times. With Street View, you've got different cycle times that go through that.”

And although Galizia acknowledges it’s a little far-reaching at the moment, he anticipates providing the ability to do spot assessing with other vehicles, such as drones, and applying AI on top of that.

“In a way, you're covering a span of a building far better than a human ever could,” he said.