Palo Alto Networks, Atos Take Top Google Cloud Partner of the Year Awards

‘Atos’ customers are interested in working with Google because of its open-source strategy, the ability to develop new cloud-native-built applications using data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, and security,’ said Wim Los, senior vice president of the Google alliance at Atos, Google Cloud’s Global Breakthrough Partner of the Year.

The Best Of The Best

Google Cloud announced its 2018 partner awards at Google Cloud Next ’19 in San Francisco last week, with SADA Systems earning the Global Reseller Partner of the Year award and Deloitte picking up Global Services Partner of the Year honors.

The cloud provider named Palo Alto Networks as its Global Technology Partner of the Year and Atos as its Global Breakthrough Partner of the Year at the annual conference’s Partner Summit.

Paris, France-based Atos started its official partnership with Google Cloud last April and has signed global companies in the industrial, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and broadcast sectors as clients.

“It’s been a very, very busy year,” Wim Los, senior vice president of Atos’ Google alliance, said at a partner roundtable at Next ’19. “Atos’ customers are interested in working with Google because of its open-source strategy, the ability to develop new cloud-native-built applications using data analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and security.”

Atos is the worldwide information technology (IT) partner of the International Olympic Committee.

“Our story we always tell our customers is, ‘If can do it for the Olympics, we can probably help you as well,’” Los said. “So that's the way we, through this partnership, have been able to really extend the service towards our customers. And we've got an incredible pipeline in a relatively short period.”

Dropbox took home Google Cloud’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Partner of the Year award, and Accenture is the Global Social Impact Partner of the Year.

Regional Reseller Partners Of The Year

Google Cloud’s regional partner of the year awards go to companies that work with the cloud provider to shape industry trends in key markets.

Onix was named Regional Reseller Partner of the Year for North America.

The Lakewood, Ohio-based company developed custom infrastructure and workplace cloud solutions to help the city of Montreal, Canada, move from its dated legacy systems to the cloud. Onix sold the city on G Suite as a cloud-based solution to modernizing its email and giving collaboration and productivity tools to employees.

Other Regional Reseller Partners of the Year were Xertica (Latin America), DoiT International (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and Searce (Japan and Asia Pacific).

Regional Services Partners Of The Year

Maven Wave earned the Regional Services Partner of the Year award for North America.

The Chicago consulting and technology firm won the honor for the second straight year for building digital solutions that leverage the innovation, security, open standards and scale provided by Google Cloud.

A Google Premier Partner for nine years, Maven Ware has Google Cloud Partner specializations in application development, cloud migration, infrastructure, location-based services, marketing analytics, data analytics, enterprise collaboration and ML.

"It is an incredible honor to receive this award for the second year in a row,” founder and partner Jason Lee said. "Google Cloud provides industry-leading, cloud-native products that allow us to accelerate the development of innovative enterprise solutions, from modernizing infrastructure to creating intelligence from data and enabling work transformation.”

Other Regional Services Partners of the Year included IPNET (Latin America), Datatonic (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and TopGate (Japan and Asia Pacific).

Regional Breakthrough Partners Of The Year

The Regional Breakthrough Partner of the Year award for North America went to EPAM Systems.

EPAM, based in Newtown, Pa., is a digital platform engineering and software development services provider with more than 700 Google Cloud-certified employees. A Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Premier System Integrator Partner and a Google Advanced Solutions Lab Partner, the company’s expertise includes infrastructure consulting and migration, cloud-native application development, cloud optimization, data strategy and consulting, and ML and automation.

Nubosoft (Latin America), Claranet (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and Bespin Global (Japan and Asia Pacific) also achieved Regional Breakthrough Partner of the Year awards.

Retail

Technology segment partners of the year helped solve customer challenges through integrations with Google Cloud solutions.

New York-based Bluecore won the Technology Partner of the Year award for retail. The retail marketing technology provider helps retailers launch personalized marketing campaign in 60 seconds -- across earned, paid, online and offline channels -- through a platform that connects real-time product catalog and customer data.

Bluecore’s retail cloud technology is built natively on GCP and is used by more than 400 retailers, including Staples, Tommy Hilfiger and Teleflora.

“This award validates the guiding assumption on which we’ve created our technology: Retailers are in need of easier ways to take control of their marketing data and quickly launch high-performing retail marketing campaigns,” said Robin Ritenour, Bluecore’s senior vice president of business development and strategic alliances.

Healthcare And Life Sciences

BrightInsight received the Google Cloud Partner of the Year award for healthcare and life sciences.

In March 2018, the San Jose, Calif., Flex-owned company launched its Brightside Platform, a digital health, internet-of-things platform built on GCP that enables biopharma and medical technology companies to develop and host digital health devices, applications and algorithms at scale while maintaining privacy, security and regulatory compliance requirements. Brightside’s wins since have included Danish multinational pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk selecting it as its global digital health partner to develop solutions for diabetes patients.

“Our platform is built under a quality management system to securely manage highly regulated medical device data and personal health information,” said Dr. BrightInsight’s president. “Through our partnership with Google Cloud, we can support our customer’s regulated digital health solutions at scale.”

Media And Entertainment

Google Cloud named Santa Clara, Calif.- based NVIDIA as its Technology Partner of the Year in media and entertainment.

“NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units) have long-powered stunning visual effects for feature films, including all the best visual effects nominees and winners at the Academy Awards for the last 10 years,” Anne Hecht, senior director of product marketing for NVIDIA GRID, said in a blog post announcing the award. “NVIDIA helps artists create captivating visual effects, renders and animations faster than ever through innovations such as GPU-rendering to AI acceleration. We’ve been working with Google Cloud to allow Google Cloud Platform users to deploy next-generation computer graphics — including real-time ray tracing, AI, simulation and rasterization — from any location, on any device, using virtual workstations.”

Financial Services

Newry, Northern Ireland-based Kx earned the Technology Partner of the Year award for the financial services industry.

A First Derivatives division, Kx provides in-memory, time-series database technology through its kdb+ on GCP system. It was recognized for its work helping customers involved in high-performance, capital markets trading to quickly scale their resources for burst processing, modelling and back-testing purposes.

“Our trading customers use kdb+ because they demand high performance and extremely fast speeds to maintain their competitive edge in market data analytics,” said Glenn Wright, Kx’s senior systems architect.

Data And Analytics

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Confluent was Google Cloud’s Technology Partner of the Year for data and analytics.

The enterprise event streaming platform provider helps customers build mission-critical use cases, including event-driven applications, advanced analytics using ML and hybrid-cloud data pipelines to move workloads to the cloud. Last week it announced a partnership to operate a managed service integrated into GCP.

“With Confluent and Google Cloud, developers can focus on building applications rather than operating, scaling and securing the underlying Apache Kafka infrastructure,” Confluent cofounder and CEO Jay Kreps said.

Infrastructure

NetApp, a hybrid cloud data services provider, was named Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for infrastructure.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for GCP provides cloud-native, fully-managed file storage services for running applications, analytics and DevOps in Google Cloud.

“It has been an incredible experience to work so closely with the Google Cloud team,” said Anthony Lye, NetApp’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud data services. “The combination of NetApp’s leading cloud data services with Google Cloud’s leadership in application development, analytics and machine learning fuels business growth by delivering data-rich customer experiences through new application deployments in the cloud.”

AI And ML

Iron Mountain won the Technology Partner of the Year award for AI and ML.

The Boston-based company combined its data and content management expertise with Google Cloud’s AI and ML capabilities to create Iron Mountain InSight, its cloud-native, subscription-based platform. The platform ingests physical and digital content from multiple data sources, correlates it across the sources, uses ML models for analysis and correlation, and allows access through multimedia dashboards. It also incorporates a policy and privacy engine to help companies meet regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act.

Best Of The Rest

Other Google Cloud Technology Partners of the Year were Streak (G Suite), Cisco Systems (containers), HashiCorp (developer ecosystem), Itopia (cloud commerce) and Area 1 Security (security).

Miami’s Itopia was honored for its work helping customers rapidly onboard and manage desktops and applications on GCP. The Itopia Cloud Automation Stack software is a proprietary, end-to-end automation and orchestration SaaS solution that, combined with Google Compute Engine, offers an intuitive platform for enterprise workloads. Systems Administrators can onramp desktops and proprietary apps to GCP in a fraction of the time and cost of legacy Citrix/VMware systems and DaaS competitors, including AWS Workspaces, according to the company.

"Itopia's integration with the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace in 2018 completely transformed our go-to-market strategy with Google Cloud," co-founder and CEO Jonathan Lieberman said. "It greatly simplified how customers consume our solution by automating the migration of desktops and IT workloads to GCP through single-click deployments. It also reduced sales cycles and unified the billing for both GCP consumption and our solution.”

Area 1’s security award honors the Redwood City, Calif., company’s work in helping customers protect against phishing attacks. Its anti-phishing technology extends Google Cloud's security features.

"Cyber attacks are an essential tool for disrupting business, stealing information and intellectual property, inflicting financial losses and conducting espionage with limited resources or repercussions," Area 1 CEO Oren Falkowitz said. "Through our partnership with Google Cloud, we're now able to eliminate the cybersecurity threat that matters most and has plagued our society for far too long."

Global Specialization Partners Of The Year

Global specialization partners of the year have demonstrated success with Google Cloud across multiple industries in a particular specialization. They include Rackspace, the Cloud Migration Partner of the Year.

The recognition is “the latest validation of Rackspace’s disruptive, integrated and flexible approach to delivering next-generation cloud services that span the full spectrum of the cloud journey -- from navigation to operations to optimization,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and infrastructure services at the Windcrest, Texas-based Rackspace.

Pythian, an IT consultant and managed service provider won the Global Data Analytics Partner of the Year award.

The Ottawa company recently aided the England and Wales Cricket Board when it needed to analyze more cricket matches than its manual process allowed. Using Google Cloud, Pythian helped the board use AI to automate video labeling and expand its recording footage analysis, allowing it to provide more data-driven features for fans using its mobile application.

“We've worked hard over the past few years achieving our GCP Data Analytics Specialization, increasing our certifications focused on data engineering and solutions architecture, and being laser focused on data-related projects such as migrating customers off of legacy on-premise-type technology like Hadoop and Teradata and moving them to enterprise data lakes on GCP,” said Vanessa Simmons, Pythian’s vice president of business development.

Google Cloud’s other Global Specialization Partners of the Year included EdTechTeam (education), Cloud Technology Solutions (enterprise collaboration), OniGroup (location-based services), Cloudreach (security), Cloud Ace (application development), G-Company, (infrastructure), Quantiphi (ML) and ROI Training (training).

ROI won the training award for the second consecutive year. The company designs and develops customized technology and management training programs. It’s trained more than 40,000 people on GCP in 25-plus countries.

"Our partnership with Google Cloud continues to scale at an exciting rate,” cofounder and CEO David Carey said. “We…look forward to delivering thousands of highly skilled and certified cloud engineers to the marketplace.”