New Google Cloud Center Provides ISV/SaaS ‘Evangelism’

‘We're providing evangelism capabilities so that we can help the ISVs understand how we can support them…and solution architects so that we can work hand in hand with them to be able to define the solution architecture of how they would move their application to the cloud,’ Siddhartha Agarwal, Google Cloud’s managing director of SaaS partnerships, tells CRN.

Google Cloud has launched a new center of excellence to provide “evangelism capabilities” and dedicated resources to help independent software vendors (ISVs) accelerate their cloud transformations.

The Google Cloud ISV/SaaS Center of Excellence will provide training, hands-on design workshops and field enablement -- applying Google Cloud’s experience delivering applications and products at massive scale -- to help ISVs move their software from on premises to the cloud and leverage the No. 3 cloud computing provider’s and broader Google’s capabilities.

“We're providing evangelism capabilities so that we can help the ISVs understand how we can support them…and solution architects so that we can work hand in hand with them to be able to define the solution architecture of how they would move their application to the cloud,” Siddhartha Agarwal (pictured), Google Cloud’s managing director of SaaS partnerships, told CRN.

The center will work with ISVs whether they’re transforming their applications with open, cloud-agnostic architectures, transforming their users’ experience through artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and voice or delivering intelligent insights from their applications by providing analytics to business users.

“Many ISVs are working with customers to migrate business critical applications from on premises to the cloud, either ‘lifting-and-shifting’ as quickly and easily as possible, or, more often, taking the opportunity to upgrade and adopt modern, cloud-native architectures based on containers, microservices, serverless and open source software,” said Agarwal. “Others are transforming not just their products, but their business models as they transition to a managed service or SaaS model.”

The center will help ISVs get their products certified on the Google Cloud Platform, support their applications and build scalable deployment methodologies, so they have a repeatable way of moving their customers to the cloud or deploying their software in the cloud, according to Agarwal.

“It’s really powerful to engage these ISVs,” Agarwal said. “We can help bring them onto a cloud platform, because they and their customers then represent significant scale of impact.”

Customers are asking their software vendors to move their solutions to the cloud, because they don't want to maintain their own data centers. They want to leverage the cloud for lower costs, faster innovation and access to evolving technology and stronger security, and to meet compliance requirements and deliver global availability with greater elasticity -- especially during a time in which the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has placed significantly higher demand on their operations.

Many ISVs don't know how they can leverage Google Cloud technologies such as Big Query or Contact Center AI -- or Google’s broader capabilities such as Google Shopping, Google Pay or Google Ads, according to Agarwal.

The center’s evangelists are “very ISV-centric, meaning they understand the partner motion, they understand what software vendors need to do, and they have really good skills around being able to talk to the chief product officer, talk to the head of engineering at these ISVs and to engage with them on how we can co-create and co-innovate with them, and define a joint go to market,” he said.

“We will be supporting this globally -- North America and EMEA being a couple of key areas of focus -- and we will be leveraging resources across the globe to be able to support our ISVs wherever they are, though a large portion of ISVs are in North America and India,” Agarwal said. “The total addressable market in terms of the amount of software being sold by these ISVs is very large. If you take the SaaS providers themselves, the top 20 percent…have a $5 billion dollar total addressable market opportunity with us.”

Working With Temenos And OpenText

Google Cloud has been working on the ISV/SaaS Center of Excellence for the last approximately nine months, with ISVs including Geneva, Switzerland-based Temenos and Waterloo, Ontario-based OpenText participating as it took shape.

Temenos is a banking software provider with about 3,000 financial services customers. The center worked with it to create an architecture based on Google Cloud’s hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform.

“We were actually able to (use) Anthos and create an active architecture, such that the banks can still use the on-prem software if they want, or they can deliver the Temenos software from the cloud,” Agarwal said. “We also provided our DevOps best practices of running these applications at massive scale.”

Working with the center has enabled Temenos to “move faster by gaining access to hands-on technical knowledge when we need it and providing access to expertise deep within Google,” according to Tony Coleman, product director of Temenos technology.

OpenText develops enterprise information management software. Google Cloud helped the company integrate its Digital Experience Platform with the Google Marketing Platform that includes Google Ads and Google Analytics 360.

“(We) have been able to take that combined data and put that into our smart analytics solution, which is a combination of BigQuery and our AL/ML,” Agarwal said. “Now, OpenText customers who are already using Google Marketing Platform to engage customers, to engage prospects better… can leverage that existing knowledge and infrastructure to easily deliver more personalized and relevant experiences on the websites that the customers are putting together that are DXP-powered. That results in higher conversion rates.”