Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executive

Empowering partners to thrive during this time of rapid transformation.

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Jun 11, 2024 • 0sec

223 - Unlocking Cloud Success with Dux Raymond Sy, AvePoint's Chief Brand Officer

Dux Raymond Sy, Chief Brand Officer at AvePoint, joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® With over 20 years of business, marketing, and technology experience, Dux has driven organizational transformations worldwide with his ability to simplify complex ideas and deliver relevant solutions. He is recognized by Microsoft as Regional Director (RD) and Most Valuable Professional (MVP), as well as the author of LinkedIn Learning course How to Build Your Personal Brand, book SharePoint for Project Management, and numerous whitepapers and articles. In today’s episode, we are excited to welcome a leader who stands at the forefront of technological advancements, Dux Raymond Sy. AvePoint is a global leader in data management and security solutions in the cloud, collaborating closely with hyperscalers and integrating AI into their offerings. Dux will discuss how AvePoint is driving change and helping partners achieve their greatest success through cutting-edge solutions and strategic partnerships. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_wFKkp05M LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP What You’ll Learn The importance of knowing when to pivot in business Timestamp: 00;30;02;16 – 00;30;05;09 Vince and Dux discuss the significance of pivoting in business growth. Embracing a growth mindset Timestamp: 00;30;06;24 – 00;30;08;14 They emphasize the role of a growth mindset in personal and professional development. Taking calculated risks Timestamp: 00;30;32;26 – 00;30;33;29 Dux advocates for taking risks in business endeavors despite uncertainties. Choosing guests for a hypothetical dinner party Timestamp: 00;30;51;03 – 00;30;59;17 Vince and Dux discuss inviting historical figures like Tim Berners-Lee and Mother Teresa. Tim Berners-Lee’s impact on the internet Timestamp: 00;31;18;09 – 00;31;30;23 They reflect on Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web and its global implications. Mother Teresa’s legacy of service Timestamp: 00;32;30;20 – 00;32;37;21 Dux praises Mother Teresa’s dedication to helping the marginalized and underserved. Personal sacrifices and family influence Timestamp: 00;33;15;29 – 00;33;34;24 Dux shares personal sentiments about his late father’s sacrifices and influence on his life. Perspective on wealth and impact Timestamp: 00;34;21;02 – 00;34;45;12 They discuss the balance between financial success and making a positive impact on the world. Encouragement to seize business opportunities Timestamp: 00;35;16;08 – 00;35;33;25 Dux advises listeners to jump into business opportunities without overthinking, emphasizing the current market dynamics. Invitation to engage with their partnership community Timestamp: 00;36;44;29 – 00;37;23;27 Vince invites listeners to participate in their partnership community and discusses the future of their collaborative platform. Quotes “AI has democratized technology, making it accessible just like the World Wide Web did for the internet.”“Effective partnering goes beyond PR; it’s about mutual benefit and aligning success metrics.”“Our strategy focuses on creating value through trust and open communication, ensuring lasting partnerships.” Transcript – Created by Adobe AI(there may be some typos) 00;00;00;04 – 00;00;08;21DuxBut I think what happened with OpenAI, especially ChatGPT, just democratize AI. It made available public, just like what the World Wide Web did for the internet. 00;00;08;21 – 00;00;12;00VinceExactly. 00;00;12;03 – 00;00;39;12VinceWelcome back to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Manzi on your host, and I’m on a mission to empower every individual, organization and partner to achieve their greatest results through successful partnering. Much of the discussion we’ve been having has been around the tectonic shifts this decade of the ecosystem, the increasing dominance of the three hyperscalers and the role of AI, the dominance of AI, and the future opportunities around AI. 00;00;39;15 – 00;01;05;27VinceAnd my guest today is a leader in an organization that’s at the forefront of some of this technology, working with the hyperscalers, infusing AI into their solutions, and driving the change. We’re seeing partners drive to lead to their greatest success. My guest today is Dux Raymond CI, the chief brand officer of AB Point and a long time friend of this podcast, and me personally. 00;01;06;00 – 00;01;07;23VinceDucks, welcome to the podcast. 00;01;07;29 – 00;01;12;24DuxHey, Vince. Thank you for having me back. I should buy you dinner. 00;01;12;26 – 00;01;16;00Vincewell, look where we are, right? I mean, we’re in Boca Raton, Florida. 00;01;16;01 – 00;01;17;12DuxWe’re not really at the beach, are we? 00;01;17;15 – 00;01;23;25VinceWell, we’re too close to the beach. I got about a mile away here, but we like to bring the beach front here in the studio. 00;01;23;26 – 00;01;31;16DuxI got to tell you, this is my. Believe it or not, first time in Boca. I’ve been in Miami a lot. Crazy. But this is a nice part of Florida. 00;01;31;16 – 00;01;32;22VinceIt’s a nice little spot. 00;01;32;23 – 00;01;34;23DuxIt’s like a hidden secret, you know. 00;01;34;24 – 00;01;58;15VincePalm Beach County, I live in Jupiter a little bit further north, but it’s still, this is all a great spot. And, you know, we talked about this at our event that this is the place where Bill gates came to 43 years ago. That’s crazy. Signed the agreement with IBM. Right. And that sparked this ecosystem. Really. Did that change the flip from hardware centric to software centric really happened at that point or after that point. 00;01;58;17 – 00;02;04;29DuxIn one thing that struck me when you said that is, I wonder why this didn’t become the Silicon Valley. 00;02;05;02 – 00;02;06;18VinceIt’s crazy. It didn’t. Yeah. 00;02;06;19 – 00;02;08;00DuxIBM was out here. 00;02;08;03 – 00;02;20;14VinceYou know, maybe the intention was that it was going to be right. So in New York, company comes down, opens a Boca Raton campus way back in the day. That’s right. 6070s, Florida went through some interesting times. That’s a whole nother podcast. 00;02;20;18 – 00;02;21;09DuxThere you go. 00;02;21;12 – 00;02;46;09VinceBut, you know, we had a conversation at our event around AI. This $158 billion opportunity that Canalys is cited. And also the change in sentiment towards AI. Right. With what’s happened in the last 18 months. Right. The way it’s written, none of us expected it. Microsoft didn’t expect it. Google didn’t expect that they were all flat footed in some respects when the release of open AI happened. 00;02;46;10 – 00;02;49;09VinceRight. What would you say about that? 00;02;49;12 – 00;03;13;10DuxI think look, AI is nothing new. You and I know this. It’s been around. I would say even the late 70s, all the work has begun back then. For us as a company, we’ve been developing products that relies on the AI starting 2018, 2019. But I think what happened with OpenAI, especially ChatGPT, just democratize AI. It made available public just like the world Wide Web did for the internet. 00;03;13;10 – 00;03;13;29VinceExactly. 00;03;13;29 – 00;03;16;28DuxAnd it’s an exciting time. Yep. Yeah. 00;03;17;01 – 00;03;34;22VinceIt’s amazing time. So I’m going to back up for a second because we got we got so entrenched in this conversation about Boka that I didn’t get a chance to ask you to introduce yourself. you’ve been on this podcast a few times. In fact, I have a funny story and I’m going to share it with our viewers and listeners here. 00;03;34;24 – 00;03;55;12VinceDucks was one of my very first podcast guests. I was using zoom to record out of my room back in the day. And, in those days, you had hit the record button on zoom in order to record the podcast. This is like 2017, right? And we had the most fast like, most engaging conversation. You were just on a chair. 00;03;55;12 – 00;03;59;07VinceYou were going. So it was so good. And then I looked up it and I realized. 00;03;59;07 – 00;03;59;13DuxI had. 00;03;59;13 – 00;04;06;29VinceAlready that was a recording. I said, Dax, we got to start it, start all over again. And that was it. That was a great time. You’ve been on the podcast a few times since. 00;04;07;05 – 00;04;13;13DuxWell, thank you, thank you. I’m so grateful and, honored to be back time and again. And now together here. 00;04;13;20 – 00;04;28;04VinceWe’ve uplevel the experience now for our viewers and our listeners. But for those who haven’t, don’t that don’t know ducks. And there may be 1 or 2 people, not many that I know that don’t know who you are. Ducks. Raymond Sai, can you tell us a little bit about yourself at that point? 00;04;28;06 – 00;04;48;03DuxWell, my name is Ducks Raymond Sai and yes, you heard that right. Ducks, ducks. I got all the Monroe. I serve as the chief brand officer of appoint, an appointed global leader of data management and data security solutions in the cloud. As a company, we’ve been around, boy, 22 years, and we built the business on the backs of Microsoft. 00;04;48;03 – 00;04;59;18DuxAnd now we offer a lot of solutions throughout the different cloud platforms. So personally, it’s been an amazing ride. I’ve been with the airplane for almost 12 years now, but in the industry it seems longer. 00;04;59;18 – 00;05;00;17VinceIt seems so much like I. 00;05;00;17 – 00;05;08;10DuxKnow I’ve been in this industry a lot more than 24 years. Yeah, I mean, you and I don’t look that, but yeah, we are. 00;05;08;10 – 00;05;24;29VinceYou’re much younger than I am. But you’ve had a fascinating, journey yourself as well. We’ll talk a little bit more about at 5.2 and the journey of the organization, because it’s been fascinating as well. But, you know, your personal story, like I remember I think you shared it. You know, we were both on social quite a bit. 00;05;24;29 – 00;05;36;29VinceAnd I remember you showed it very early clip of yourself. I think you were at a SharePoint conference something and you were asked and it was a different duck’s like that experience. Tell us about your transformation. Your personal transformation. 00;05;37;02 – 00;05;53;18DuxWell, I got to say this, my transformation and the opportunities that came my way wouldn’t have been possible if I was in the United States. Yeah. So regardless of what people say, there’s no perfect place in the world. To me, this is still the best place to thrive and grow and be successful. 00;05;53;19 – 00;05;55;02VinceAbsolutely. 00;05;55;04 – 00;05;58;24DuxI’m an electrical engineer. I start my day. 00;05;58;25 – 00;05;59;13VinceIt’s amazing. 00;05;59;13 – 00;06;04;23DuxI start my career in the mid 90s. I work for a small company called Siemens. 00;06;04;25 – 00;06;06;00VinceYeah, a little company. 00;06;06;02 – 00;06;27;06DuxYeah. And then a year or so later, I realize I like coding, but I like people more. Yeah. I just can’t sit all day long coding. Yeah. And that started my career as an entrepreneur. So I started my business. In fact, it was a back then MSP wasn’t a thing, but that’s what we did. We did services. We managed technology for customers. 00;06;27;09 – 00;06;49;03DuxAnd I remember as an entrepreneur I’m like, oh, I’m technically savvy. I should get customers. Not really. So I had to learn sales. I had to learn marketing with no money. And I go, how can I get people to know about me and my company? I’m like, I’m gonna write a book. So at that time I go, well, there’s this thing called SharePoint. 00;06;49;03 – 00;06;58;13DuxSeems like it’s hot. And I we’ve been using it, we’ve been developing stuff on it. So I pitched the idea SharePoint for a project management to O’Reilly media. I don’t, you know, O’Reilly. 00;06;58;13 – 00;07;02;27VinceI do from our previous conversation, but I don’t think many of our viewers and listeners know or. 00;07;02;28 – 00;07;20;28DuxKnow they don’t know O’Reilly, but they’re the books with animals on it. Yes. So I remember they assign me an animal and explain how it relates to the title of my book. Oh, that was pretty cool. And yeah, the rest is history. So after that book, I started writing a lot. I get to speak at events, say you’re. 00;07;20;28 – 00;07;25;01VinceA foremost expert in SharePoint, which was a hot was a hot product back in those days. 00;07;25;02 – 00;07;32;14DuxOh, yeah. And even today, a lot of people don’t know this, but the content fabric of 365 is still SharePoint. 00;07;32;14 – 00;07;34;29VinceYeah. Yeah. And teams as well Microsoft Teams. 00;07;35;00 – 00;07;46;06DuxAbsolutely. So so yeah. So that was my journey. And I joined our point in 2013 in as the, public sector chief technical officer. Yes. 00;07;46;08 – 00;07;57;06VinceThat’s how we got met. I was running the public sector partner business at Microsoft, and, you you were very kind and supportive of what we were doing on our side. And, you were always my favorite partner to work with. 00;07;57;06 – 00;07;57;29DuxThank you. 00;07;58;01 – 00;08;13;07VinceAs well. So, let’s talk about this transformation of AV point. And also we’re going to dive in on AI and what that point is doing here. But your organization, we talked about this 22 year journey basically two founders. Did you started the company. 00;08;13;07 – 00;08;13;25DuxYeah. 00;08;13;27 – 00;08;19;21VinceEven when I first met you, you were still a much smaller company. Tell us more about AV point, the organization. 00;08;19;24 – 00;08;36;28DuxYeah. So today, like I mentioned, appoints a global leader in, data management and data security across all cloud platforms. We have over 21,000 customers. our technologies available over 100 marketplace around the world. That’s around the world. We’re, over 3500 partners that we work with. 00;08;36;29 – 00;08;38;07VinceSo publicly traded. 00;08;38;11 – 00;08;59;00DuxPublicly traded, and so grateful for this growth. Now, how did it start? It’s cool. Like, you hear stories out in the valley around how Google started out. Yahoo. So it’s kind of similar. But we’re just here in the East Coast. Yeah. Our founders, Chi Gong and TJ Yang, they, they just started the company building a product in the public library. 00;08;59;02 – 00;09;21;26DuxSo they built the first SharePoint migration product. And the big break was, TJ was telling me this in SharePoint 2003 event, you know, they announced SharePoint 2003. And, customers were like, well, how do we migrate this thing from 2001? And they he said, I raised my hand. I said, we have a product for it. So that was the big break. 00;09;21;27 – 00;09;26;03VinceFascinating. Did they actually have a product at that point? Maybe almost. 00;09;26;03 – 00;09;28;29DuxBut they did. They did. a week later they had it right. 00;09;29;00 – 00;09;29;23VinceThat’s fascinating. 00;09;29;23 – 00;09;39;29DuxAnd and then. Yeah. And then the business grew. We provide a lot of capabilities around SharePoint. And I think the secret to our point is really listening to customers. 00;09;40;06 – 00;09;40;18VinceYes. 00;09;40;25 – 00;09;52;11Duxthe evolving needs a customer. So we built a full suite of product for SharePoint on prem. And then in 2010 when Microsoft decided in 2011 that they’re going to go all in the cloud, if you remember, because. 00;09;52;13 – 00;09;59;16VinceOh, I remember people very well. Thank you. How could you forget a name like beep beep. That’s right. Business process. 00;09;59;17 – 00;10;01;19DuxI know I’m crazy. This is productivity. 00;10;01;23 – 00;10;05;23VinceProductivity online services. Thank you I that’s really what it stood for. 00;10;05;28 – 00;10;09;01DuxAnd for those that don’t know what it is it’s it’s Microsoft 365. 00;10;09;01 – 00;10;10;05VinceYeah it basically. 00;10;10;05 – 00;10;27;28DuxIs. And then what. So Microsoft rounded up some key partners say, hey, we’re going to do this. Who’s in with us. And we need partners to make this work. So we raised our hand was like, yeah, we’ll build with you. But that was a big, big bit. I remember internal conversations. You know, there are some people like who’s going to go to the cloud, like, why are we doing this? 00;10;27;28 – 00;10;34;27DuxYeah. Because that also means shifting our revenue model to subscription. Right. 00;10;35;00 – 00;10;37;12VinceVery different revenue model. Very different. Yes. 00;10;37;12 – 00;10;58;12DuxBut we went through that transition. So today our platform, it’s called the confidence platform where across over 14 data centers around the world now and we manage hundreds and hundreds of petabytes of data. we have all the global certifications. You’re FedRAMP, you’re in the US certification in Australia, and we’re continuing to invest in our technology platform. 00;10;58;13 – 00;10;59;03VinceIt’s fascinating. 00;10;59;03 – 00;11;22;14DuxAnd the cool story about that. Everything we’ve learned around there, partners have access to it to offer to their customers as well. And last thing I want to say about App Point is, I don’t know if I’ve shared this. The logo is very meaningful to us, and our point logo means two things. It’s always dream big and be humble about it. 00;11;22;14 – 00;11;33;03DuxBecause the A in the circle shows the sun is always rising. It’s always like this. Big dreams, big hope. But it also means somebody with the head bowed down. 00;11;33;05 – 00;11;36;04VinceI never noticed that. Yeah, I never noticed. So fascinating. 00;11;36;04 – 00;11;48;17DuxAlways dream big, but with humility. So that’s been anchoring the organization and we’re continue to innovate. We’re keen to do what’s possible, especially now, you know, with AI. 00;11;48;20 – 00;12;22;14VinceWe are thrilled to announce our partnership with Partner Software, the world’s leading provider of partner management technologies, serving over 4 million partners globally. In partner excels in delivering cutting edge solutions for partner relationship management and partner marketing automation. Their robust platform offers essential tools like program compliance tracking, customizable partner journeys, and comprehensive business planning. These features empower our partner teams to swiftly transition from program design to achieving maximum value. 00;12;22;20 – 00;12;45;21VinceIn partner is dedicated to supporting partner ecosystems everywhere and continues to innovate with new modules like Analytics Studio Design to help track and maximize the ROI of your partner program. For more information, visit in partner.com. 00;12;45;24 – 00;13;15;01VinceSo, you may know this by now because, I’ve been talking about the seven principles of successful partnering now for many years. And basically boiled down a set of operating principles that I believe to be successful. And you represent one of those operating principles in a big way. And, many times when I am giving presentations and doing keynotes, I talk about one of those principles around effective partnering, being about brand and story. 00;13;15;03 – 00;13;33;14VinceAnd thank you. I, I, I reference you quite a bit because I think that you’ve done probably one of the most effective jobs I’ve seen. And I mean this truly is a compliment of understanding how to work with the tech giant, whether it be a Microsoft, a Google or an Amazon, and building those relationships and building that brand. 00;13;33;18 – 00;14;00;09VinceAnd we talk about like, what are the pinnacle partners to what are the most award winning partners? And at five point has been a Global Partner of the year award winner multiple years in a row. you have done some things differently, I believe I love it. If you could dive in a little bit, but I do think that you exude this brand and story message better than most organizations like building your relationships, building your story, being known for something that others aren’t known for. 00;14;00;09 – 00;14;03;10VinceKids spend a few moments here for our viewers and listeners. 00;14;03;10 – 00;14;26;15DuxAbsolutely. I think, you know, as I reflect on that question, I think there’s three core things that not only important to me, but important to our point as an organization, we partner regardless with if it’s with the hyperscalers or with our channel ecosystem. Well, first and foremost, at the end of the day, we’re we’re a business, right? So we have to focus on the alignment and what the mutual benefit is. 00;14;26;17 – 00;14;45;16DuxYou know, oftentimes we see press releases, oh, you know, and so and so partner with so and so. But to me it’s beyond that. It’s not just this PR take a picture and let’s put it on social. We have to think about what your needs are. What what’s your metric for success in what ours are. 00;14;45;17 – 00;14;49;00VinceSo what’s your scorecard? We used to call it back and then. Yeah, exactly. 00;14;49;00 – 00;15;09;25DuxKPIs scorecard OKRs. Right. However you want to call it. But so for example, our solutions today addresses the need of a massive addressable market. Right. So let’s just pick Microsoft Microsoft 365 at least last they report they have over 350 million paying subscribers a month. 00;15;09;26 – 00;15;12;26Vince350 million paid paid. 00;15;12;26 – 00;15;28;13DuxThat’s only Microsoft haven’t talked about Google or Salesforce or none of that, right? That’s paid to us. That’s massive. Yeah. And then more importantly, as a vendor, we know that these customers would need help around services. 00;15;28;13 – 00;15;29;03VinceThat’s right. 00;15;29;05 – 00;15;50;28DuxSo what we can do is we come to our channel ecosystem and say, sure, today, let let let me say MSPs, let me pick them. Right. They do a lot of work around migration, for example, taking customer two 365 or protecting their data with backup. Yeah. But what we’re saying is you can actually offer more services. You know, you can increase your recurring revenue. 00;15;51;00 – 00;16;12;29DuxNow. Copilot help customers get their data ready, secure it, optimize it on an ongoing basis. So so to me, it’s focusing on that alignment and mutual benefit. We win and they win. I think the the next thing is, my next step is just having, open communication and, and build trust. At the end of the day, people buy from people. 00;16;12;29 – 00;16;14;04VinceThat’s right. 00;16;14;06 – 00;16;21;14DuxI can give you the most MDF or, you know, the most incentives and discounts, what have you. But if I can’t trust you, Vince. 00;16;21;14 – 00;16;22;22VinceI’m sorry. Yeah. 00;16;22;24 – 00;16;28;18DuxIt’s true. So? So it’s a human relationship in. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. 00;16;28;20 – 00;16;48;29VinceI love what you have to say here. And what I will also add to that too, is understanding, taking an active role with your partner. and then maybe that’s where the trust piece comes in, right. I know you and I both are active in an organization as advisors. and, and building those personal relationships over time, over years. 00;16;48;29 – 00;16;52;11VinceRight? It just doesn’t happen overnight. This is not a once in done thing that we do. 00;16;52;18 – 00;17;08;04DuxAnd then that’s why I always, you know, when I hear conversation around, oh, I got to meet this person to do account mapping. Yeah. It doesn’t work like that. You know, if that’s the first thing you say, hey, I want to schedule a meeting to do a mapping that’s so transactional. Nobody’s gonna respond. 00;17;08;04 – 00;17;09;10VinceNobody’s going to respond to that. 00;17;09;10 – 00;17;10;08DuxNo. 00;17;10;10 – 00;17;31;09VinceSo we’ve been talking about these tectonic shifts. Yeah, we’ve been talking about this time of transformation, the hyper, the massive role of the hyperscalers. It’s just it’s incredible. Like nobody else can make these massive investments. That’s why they’re the hyperscalers, right? Microsoft $14 billion a quarter. That’s right in build out. It’s crazy chips and infrastructure just that alone. 00;17;31;11 – 00;17;53;01VinceAnd now we layer in AI and this massive opportunity around AI. And at our event you spoke about what have points been doing around AI and what you think about AI and its and its future potential. I was hoping we could talk more about that and also wanted to cite that like, you know, 18 months ago, we weren’t having these conversations. 00;17;53;01 – 00;18;08;03VinceAs you said, AI’s been around for 20, 30 years, maybe longer. But really, we weren’t really having the conversations about AI that we’re having today to talk more about how you’re infusing AI into your business and how you’re thinking about the future growth and opportunities. 00;18;08;03 – 00;18;14;29DuxSure. Well, first question I have is, have you bought any Nvidia stocks? I look at their market cap. 00;18;15;02 – 00;18;24;03Vincethere’s a long story about my Nvidia stock, and I’d rather not share it publicly, but, let’s just say I had Tesla and Nvidia at one point. There you go. And I sold the wrong one. Okay. 00;18;24;06 – 00;18;24;17DuxAll right. 00;18;24;17 – 00;18;26;10VinceNow let’s just say. 00;18;26;12 – 00;18;26;24DuxToday. 00;18;26;25 – 00;18;30;26VinceToday. But I but I’m mostly into, you know, the broad markets. 00;18;30;27 – 00;18;31;11DuxThere you go. 00;18;31;12 – 00;18;36;17VinceI don’t I don’t I try not to make too many individual investment decisions for longer. 00;18;36;19 – 00;18;55;27DuxSo indeed as, as we discuss. Right. There’s massive opportunity for you. Yeah. But specific to us, you know, there’s really three things we’re doing today that we think will help us grow and maximize this AI opportunity. So first we’re really investing internally equipping our pointers. 00;18;56;04 – 00;18;56;24VinceNice to. 00;18;56;24 – 00;19;24;15DuxEmbrace AI. I’m not just talking about devs, I’m talking about devs to business teams. You know, accounting, finance, marketing and where you talk about drinking the Kool-Aid. We’re all in like, but what’s so cool is we use copilot, our one of my finance colleagues, he’s he’s like the most power user I know, but it’s awesome because to us, sure, we can sell AI related products, but the mindset has changed. 00;19;24;15 – 00;19;28;01DuxAnd so this is just a totally different way of working, thinking and coding. 00;19;28;02 – 00;19;29;12VinceAnd it changes every day. 00;19;29;12 – 00;19;55;03DuxIt does, it does. And for example, prompting is important. Well, I said cool. It’s really not that smart. Yeah. You have to give proper prompts. Right. So that’s the first thing we’re doing. We’re investing internally making sure we’re adopting our mindset. We’ll really embrace AI and how we can benefit from it. Second is to a lot of customers, it’s still a novelty, right? 00;19;55;04 – 00;19;59;18DuxIt’s new, but we need to help them prepare their data. 00;19;59;21 – 00;20;01;04VinceThey’re building their muscle, too. 00;20;01;09 – 00;20;21;11DuxThey are. I mean, everybody’s excited, right? Yes. But at the same time, people don’t realize is it relies on data. And we all know that if you lift the hood under the covers. Yeah, everybody’s a digital hoarder. Their data estate is a mess. Always in. The good news is. 00;20;21;11 – 00;20;23;20VinceIt’s that drawer that empty drawer, that junk. 00;20;23;20 – 00;20;43;17DuxDrawer. That’s right. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the show hoarders. Yeah, that’s exactly what. It’s exactly what? People don’t want to admit it, but. But that’s what we’re seeing, right? A lot of organizations are piloting copilot, and then suddenly they realize, hold on, number one, how come it’s pulling information from 20 years ago? Yeah. Or number two, we’re seeing information we’re not supposed to. 00;20;43;20 – 00;20;45;22VinceYeah, that’s that’s the big issue right? 00;20;45;22 – 00;20;47;04DuxThat’s right, that’s right. 00;20;47;04 – 00;21;01;16VinceYou don’t want people to see what the cfo’s compensation is. You don’t want them to be able to see the secrets of the organization hasn’t released yet. Right? Microsoft went through an internal challenge with with a press release 100% that wasn’t ready for release. And then everybody saw that it was just this. 00;21;01;16 – 00;21;22;14DuxYear in just so you know, it’s not it’s not about people being malicious. Yeah. It’s just that there’s so much information. People don’t know what’s out there. Are the permissions set up right. So what we’re doing from an AI perspective is not only we’re equipping customers, but also partners to get their data prepared, secured and optimize. But we’ve been at this forever. 00;21;22;14 – 00;21;34;27DuxIt’s not like we just created new tools for AI. This is our core strength from day one. Yeah, and that’s really exciting. Regardless if you’re doing copilot today or not, you still have to get your data foundation. 00;21;34;27 – 00;21;35;07VinceRight. 00;21;35;11 – 00;21;56;14DuxSet up, and then the last thing we’re doing with AI is we’re investing in industry solutions. yesterday I showcase our education solution, which is which is really cool. Like you could do remote proctoring with, cognitive services. So if somebody taking a test, remote test, it will watch the environment and track your eyeballs if you’re cheating. 00;21;56;20 – 00;21;57;22VinceOh, that is fantastic. 00;21;57;22 – 00;21;59;23DuxI mean, at least in-state students. Yeah, I. 00;21;59;25 – 00;22;00;28VinceWant to say. 00;22;01;01 – 00;22;01;28DuxBut this is through here. 00;22;02;00 – 00;22;04;06VinceThis is the world we live in now. Past. Is it right? 00;22;04;07 – 00;22;22;23DuxIt is. Yeah. Another example is financial services. So we just, we’re we’re working with the government organizations and banks in Apacs to build an AI powered, solution to prevent money laundering in traffic. This is really cool stuff. And you can only do it with AI. 00;22;22;25 – 00;22;24;10VinceIt’s fascinating times we live in. 00;22;24;10 – 00;22;27;04DuxYeah. 00;22;27;06 – 00;22;51;24VinceIt’s important to me that the supplements that I take are of the highest quality. And that’s why for over seven years now, I’ve been drinking Ag1, unlike many supplement brands. And believe me, I’ve tried many of them. Ag1 is consistently looking for ways to do things better at 52 iterations of their formula and counting, their team is always finding ways to make Ag1 even better. 00;22;51;26 – 00;23;20;04VinceQuality for Ag1 isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a commitment. Backed by expert led scientific research, high quality ingredients, industry leading manufacturing and rigorous testing. At every step of the process, Ag1 goes above and beyond industry standards. I know I can trust what’s in every scoop of Ag1 because the team relies on expert led scientific research, sourcing ingredients for potency and efficacy. 00;23;20;05 – 00;23;44;14VinceTaking care of my health shouldn’t be complicated, and that’s why I rely on Ag1, because it simplifies this by covering all of my nutritional bases and setting me up for success every single day. Ag1 ingredients are heavily researched for efficacy and quality, and I love that every scoop also includes important prebiotics, probiotics, and digestive enzymes for my gut health. 00;23;44;21 – 00;24;15;10VinceSo if you want to replace your multivitamin and more like I have, start with ag1. Try ag1 and get a one year supply of vitamin D3 and five free travel packs with your first subscription, go to drink ag1.com/vince m that’s drink ag1.com/vince M check them out. So let’s talk about another topic that is near and dear to both our hearts. 00;24;15;10 – 00;24;36;17VinceAnd this is channels and ecosystems right? I mean we talk about sparking the ecosystem at point has always been a partner led organization. Building out your well start off certainly in the Microsoft world, working directly with Microsoft and then building your partner capacity over time. Let’s talk about the work and investments that that point is making here. 00;24;36;19 – 00;25;03;12DuxSo our points an organization we you know, our biggest partner is Microsoft. And all the solutions we build is around B2B enterprise technology. So through the years we’ve worked a lot with customers directly, but also in the last four years we doubled down our investment with building our channel ecosystem. today we have all kinds of partners from SES, resellers, Vars to MSPs. 00;25;03;15 – 00;25;27;08DuxBut what we’re doing of late is really investing more with our MSP partners, because we see that there’s a lot of growth in the customers that they serve, and we’re about to launch additional incentives, new benefits. But more importantly, I’m really excited about this because towards the end of the year, we’ll have an event and you’ll come to this event. 00;25;27;08 – 00;25;28;16VinceI’m looking forward to this. 00;25;28;17 – 00;25;37;11DuxWe’ll we’ll do all these announcement. But one of the cool things is we’re investing heavily in our elements partner platform in this elements. Yes. Okay. This is something I haven’t done. 00;25;37;12 – 00;25;38;22VinceYeah. No this is new to me. 00;25;38;22 – 00;26;07;01DuxYeah. So on one hand we have a lot of products that our partners take and build services on. Yes. So let’s say Copilot data readiness, backup, migration. We have all these products, but if you’re a partner, you have access to our elements partner platform. And what does that do? Our elements partner platform increases operational efficiency because you log in, you can put all your customers there and say apply this. 00;26;07;03 – 00;26;34;29DuxYou know, backup policy to my ten customers. Boom. Right. Or you can also streamline multi-tenant management because if you’re an MSP, I’m managing a company a company B company C, I would have to log in to the different environments. Yeah, yeah. But with elements. Yeah. Single pane of glass and be able to apply rules and policies and billing and licensing in one platform. 00;26;35;06 – 00;26;42;16VinceSounds fascinating. So it’s giving the MSPs again that one pane of glass. That’s right. You look at they can look across maybe multiple clients. 00;26;42;16 – 00;26;43;04DuxThat’s right. 00;26;43;06 – 00;26;44;12VinceYeah. And apply and. 00;26;44;17 – 00;27;00;11DuxApply technology and then last in rules. And lastly it automates a lot of managed services activities. So for example I talk about copilot security. In fact, yesterday, which reminded me Gartner released a report on how to secure copilot. 00;27;00;14 – 00;27;01;00VinceInteresting. 00;27;01;00 – 00;27;01;25DuxAnd they mentioned us. 00;27;02;02 – 00;27;03;12VinceOh, that’s fascinating. 00;27;03;12 – 00;27;28;28DuxThey said you need tools beyond what Microsoft Office and Apple has one of those tools. But going back to elements. So let’s say you’re an MSP. You can use elements to monitor your customer’s environment. So if there’s any behaviors or things that’s not supposed to happen, you can apply rules automatically with technology. So that reduces, you know, the need for more headcount to physically take care of your customer’s environment. 00;27;29;00 – 00;27;48;27VinceWell, you mentioned security and we talked about like the priorities of Microsoft. from our event yesterday, we had several Microsoft executives in the room as well as leaders like ducks. And it seems like, you know, some of the same priorities we talked about. I certainly AI is the number one priority, but security is becoming, omnipresent and important across the organization. 00;27;48;27 – 00;27;58;01VinceIt’s basically the foundational layer now. And Microsoft is like, I’ll say, elevating even more so the importance of security and layering and security. 00;27;58;01 – 00;28;27;02DuxThat’s right. In, in when we think about security traditionally, right, people think about security either from an endpoint, perspective network, you know, device level. But now data data security is certainly top of mind. Know when we talk about data, we sometimes we only think about structured data. But unstructured data is all over your email your chats, your files, your OneDrive documents. 00;28;27;04 – 00;28;35;07DuxSo it is it is a top of mind for a lot of leaders and organizations, especially now. They’re pushing more stuff into the cloud. 00;28;35;09 – 00;28;57;20VinceSo I mentioned that being an award winning partner, all the work that you’ve done. And again, the relationship with Microsoft, is very strong relationship that you’ve had over the years. These organizations that watch and follow along with us. So they’re all trying to figure it out their journey. Right. So what advice would you have for these partners watching and listening us with us today about optimizing for their success? 00;28;57;23 – 00;29;16;22DuxI would say, I have 3 or 4 things that I can share is number one is really be willing to work together to achieve your goals in start with something quick and small. In small may be relative, right? But you don’t need to come all. Let’s come up with our business plan for the next six months. Or yeah. 00;29;16;24 – 00;29;17;17VinceThe three year plan. 00;29;17;17 – 00;29;37;04DuxYou know, start with something for the next three months. You started one thing, right? And then iterate on that and see if it works. Even though both, on paper, the mutual benefits may look good, but you may find out. Yeah. I don’t really work well with Vince. Right. So but but come up with a project and be willing to work together right away and give those goals. 00;29;37;06 – 00;29;43;15DuxSecond is be very patient understanding because what you know what stuff will go wrong for sure. 00;29;43;18 – 00;29;44;01VinceYes. 00;29;44;01 – 00;30;02;12DuxAnd that’s okay. That’s part of just the human experience. Right. Again, on paper, on technology it may look perfect, but miscommunication may happen or certain people may drop something and and that’s perfectly fine. It’s no different than how we interact internally. 00;30;02;16 – 00;30;05;09VinceThat’s right. When you and you know when to pivot. Yeah that point. 00;30;05;12 – 00;30;06;20DuxAnd that’s that’s part of the growth. 00;30;06;24 – 00;30;08;14VinceIt’s part of the growth mindset. Yeah. 00;30;08;17 – 00;30;32;23DuxAnd then lastly I would say be willing to take risk. You know, your solution or what you’re trying to do. Your go to market may not be 100% foolproof, but time is of the essence. We’ve seen, as you mentioned, the last 18 months, stuff changed so fast, so fast. So as long as you have a good understanding, an idea where you want to get to take risks, just do something. 00;30;32;26 – 00;30;33;29DuxYeah. And then pivot. 00;30;34;01 – 00;30;51;03VinceI love it, I love it. So I love to ask a personal question. Yes, you might know and I don’t know if I ever asked you this one before, but, I’d love to do it now. Now that we’re in the studio, you’re hosting a dinner party, and you can invite any three guests from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. 00;30;51;03 – 00;30;59;17VinceDucks. We could talk about the menu and the location as well. I’d love to hear more about that. Whom would you invite? Why? 00;30;59;20 – 00;31;03;20DuxWow. This, this. How many people is it? Three. 00;31;03;20 – 00;31;04;06VinceThree? 00;31;04;07 – 00;31;10;19DuxThree people. I think. 00;31;10;22 – 00;31;18;07DuxThe person. Okay, okay. A couple people that comes to mind. The first person that comes to mind is Tim Berners-Lee, right? Yeah. 00;31;18;09 – 00;31;22;29VinceOh, yes. Yeah, yeah. We’re taking people back a few years. 00;31;23;01 – 00;31;30;23DuxYou know, Tim Berners-Lee, the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. Yes. So because of him. 00;31;30;26 – 00;31;42;09DuxThe internet’s so popular because prior to him, everything was text based. It’s all for the geeks. And what Tim Berners-Lee did he open the world to the possibilities of the internet and. 00;31;42;10 – 00;31;44;16VinceNow the ability to access. 00;31;44;19 – 00;32;00;22DuxYeah, but not only did he do that, why? Why I want to invite him. Because he didn’t make money off of it. Yeah. I think to this day he’s still a professor up in the northeast, and he still drives his old car. 00;32;00;23 – 00;32;03;11VinceYeah, but like an old Subaru or something. 00;32;03;11 – 00;32;07;17DuxOr Toyota Corolla or something. Yeah, but a lot of people made tons of money off of. 00;32;07;17 – 00;32;10;00VinceHis billions and billions and billions. Yes. 00;32;10;02 – 00;32;28;19DuxWhat I would love to learn is how does he feel about that? Right. I’m sure he’s happy. I’m sure he’s humble about it. Because if he didn’t, if he was upset, we would have heard it. Yeah, but because of that one moment, look at where we are today. 00;32;28;19 – 00;32;30;17VinceIt’s it’s incredible. 00;32;30;20 – 00;32;37;21Duxsecond person is, I would say, you know, it may sound cliche, but Mother Teresa. 00;32;37;24 – 00;32;40;23VinceInteresting. 00;32;40;25 – 00;32;49;23Duxbecause if you, if you look at her life, her background, and. But what she did, it’s this heart of service is this heart of giving back. Yeah. When you talk about. 00;32;49;23 – 00;32;51;16VinceWorking with lepers, I mean. 00;32;51;23 – 00;33;14;09DuxThe, the the this the, the, the people who the world shunned. Yeah. Don’t care for. How can you get that? Right? Like I always talk about. We always pay forward. We give back. because life is too short not to give back. Yeah. Especially what we do. Right. But. But to that extent, I don’t know, like, how could she have done that? 00;33;14;09 – 00;33;15;02DuxI want that, right. 00;33;15;02 – 00;33;15;27VinceYeah. 00;33;15;29 – 00;33;33;16DuxAnd, I think, I think the last person is, is my late dad, my late father, he, he sacrificed a lot. And, you know, he he passed away when he was quite young. So there’s now that my son’s going to college. 00;33;33;20 – 00;33;34;24VinceYeah, yeah, the. 00;33;34;24 – 00;33;38;17DuxConversations I’ve had with my son. I wish I had that with my late father. 00;33;38;17 – 00;33;43;00VinceYeah, I understand that. Yeah, I understand, that’s awesome. What a great dinner party. 00;33;43;02 – 00;33;44;10DuxIt’s going to be awesome. 00;33;44;13 – 00;33;47;04VinceWhere? Yeah, we’re going to host us. 00;33;47;06 – 00;33;51;18DuxI’ll cook. Okay. Love cooking. So it’ll be at my house and you’re invited to. 00;33;51;19 – 00;33;58;22VinceI was going to say I can bring dessert. there. You bring dessert, I’ll bring, we’ll cook maybe cookies or something. We’ll figure out what Mother Teresa likes. 00;33;58;22 – 00;33;59;09DuxThat’s right. 00;33;59;12 – 00;34;21;02VinceBut, what a great. Yeah, yeah, a humble group. But, you know, you think about, like, people where we worry about, like, making the the billion dollars, right? So many young people aspire to this. I think it’s probably one of the reasons why we talk about mental health. and always comparing yourself. No. None of the people you mentioned were millionaire millionaires and billionaires, but they had an I had an impact on the world. 00;34;21;02 – 00;34;45;12DuxThat’s right. You know, the way I think about look, money is not bad at all. But the way I think about money is, yeah, it’d be great to have money so we can give back more. We can help more. Yeah. Now, I’m not sure about, you know, different people have different, goals and but for me, if, if I’ve given the opportunity to you, you know, earn more. 00;34;45;12 – 00;34;48;22DuxAnd that’s a great opportunity to help more. Yeah. Give more back. 00;34;48;22 – 00;35;12;19VinceSo you always struck me as somebody who is of service to others. And I appreciate all the things you and your friendship all these years. one more question. We’re at that midway point, a 2024. I can’t believe how fast this year has flown by. I was just wishing you Happy New Year. Seems like yesterday. One last piece of advice for, like, for those partners that need to lean in, what would you say to them? 00;35;12;19 – 00;35;16;05VinceLike, what do they need to do this second half of the year? 00;35;16;08 – 00;35;33;25DuxI think I copilot is really hot. A lot of customers are hungry to get going and a lot of customers don’t know where to start. Jump right in. That’s just jump right in. Don’t overthink it or else you’ll miss the window. 00;35;33;27 – 00;35;55;03VinceYeah, it’s a big opportunity. Yeah. Dax, thank you so much for being an incredible guest again. And we did hit the record button this time, I promise. I want to thank each of you for your support, for following, listening, and supporting the Ultimate Guide to partnering for seven and a half years now. Wow. it has been an incredible journey. 00;35;55;06 – 00;36;12;12VinceAnd for those of you watching, hopefully you’re watching on our new YouTube channel, please subscribe. The more subscribers we get to YouTube, the more we get to feature amazing guests like ducks on this podcast. So thank you for joining ducks. Great to see you again today. Thank you. Thanks for coming to Boca for that. 00;36;12;13 – 00;36;13;00DuxThank you. 00;36;13;00 – 00;36;44;26VinceThank you. If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I built growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile, AI marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organizations that are resistant to change. I’m part of the community, special interest groups and associations, and I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. 00;36;44;29 – 00;37;08;16VinceYou see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders, ISV sellers, SES, MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystem’s growth. I’ve talked to many of you, and what I continually hear is it’s noisy. I don’t know whom to listen to and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. 00;37;08;18 – 00;37;23;27VinceWell, you’ve been heard. We’re getting ready to open the doors early to pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder, an innovator, or a leader, visit our website.

Jun 5, 2024 • 35min

217 – Decoding AWS Marketplace Success: How Partners Achieved Billions Last Year.

Josh Greene Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® We are excited to launch our first AWS episode in years. Join us as we delve into marketplace development and partnership success at AWS with our special guest, Josh Greene. Josh is responsible for Marketplace Success at AWS and brings over 20 years of experience in startups, channel partners, and ISVs to this role. In this episode, Josh brings valuable insights into driving revenue generation, strategic partnerships, and global expansion, decoding AWS Marketplace Success, and how partners achieved billions last year. Josh shares his expertise as the Sr. Manager of Global Seller Innovation/MP Development at AWS. Discover how AWS and partners leverage cloud commitments for partner success, the strategies behind AWS Marketplace growth, and the pivotal role of partner engineering in streamlining the sales process. Tune in to learn the importance of collaboration, innovation, and customer obsession in achieving success with AWS Marketplace. Don’t miss out on actionable insights to scale your business and drive innovation with AWS. What You’ll Learn Marketplace development and partnership success at AWS. (0:02) Leveraging cloud commitments for partner success. (4:06) Leveraging AWS Marketplace for partner success. (9:09) AWS marketplace growth, leadership principles, and customer obsession. (14:05) Partnering with AWS and reaching a billion-dollar milestone. (18:18) The importance of partner engineering in streamlining the sales process. (23:41) AWS success factors, including urgency, coalition building, and vision creation. (28:22) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube Announcing Ultimate Partner Experience Ever wonder what you could achieve with the right partners by your side? Dive into the Ultimate Partner Experience Community (UPX) and discover a world brimming with possibilities! Don’t miss out on 50% off for your first year using code EARLYBIRD at checkout. Exclusive Content Gain access to cutting-edge content and events crafted by partnership professionals. Stay ahead with strategies, trends, and in-depth interviews with the industry leaders in partnerships. Access to a Like-Minded Community Our next event is just around the corner and everyone is welcome. Although the event is open to the public, we want to give a special privilege to our members. Which means the Q&A session is exclusive to members only. It’s bound to be an exciting event and we look forward to seeing you all there! Make Connections That Matter! Dive right in and send a direct message to any member of UPX community! You are not just joining a group, but unlocking an open and vibrant network of professionals waiting to connect with you. Seize this golden opportunity to expand your horizons, fuel your career growth and discover exhilarating business prospects. The world is your oyster at UPX, let’s explore it together! Come Join Us I’m thrilled to welcome you to this journey. Let’s navigate, thrive, and redefine success in the tech partnership landscape together. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos Summary Keywords Summary Keywords aws, partners, marketplace, organisations, work, customer, cloud, isps, programme, team, terms, conversation, budget, successful, partnering, sellers, dinner party, snowflake, success, years Vince Menzione 0:02 Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And on finding this player intent. You show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant everyday, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel Vince Menzione 0:23 success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Welcome back to ultimate guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione. Owner and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And today, I’m excited to welcome back AWS back in the house for compelling conversation with Josh Green, the Senior Manager of marketplace development at AWS. Such a great conversation with Josh about the success he’s had enrolled the last four and a half years driving this marketplace strategy at AWS. The work he’s done with some of the biggest ISV marketplace organisations like CrowdStrike, and snowflake, and his best practices that he’ll share for successful marketplace development and deployment. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed welcoming Josh Green. Josh, welcome to the podcast. Josh Greene 1:26 Thanks for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. Vince Menzione 1:28 I am so excited to have you. And AWS back in the house. It’s been quite some time, since we’ve had an AWS episode. And you and I got to meet actually last year at the catalyst event back in August seems like 100 years ago, right? It was it like six months or so not even. You’re the Senior Manager of marketplace development at AWS. And I am so excited to welcome you today to ultimate guide to partner. Well, ever since we Josh Greene 1:54 first met and I started seeing what you’ve been doing. I’ve been excited to speak more with you and share some of the insights but I’m really happy to be here today. Vince Menzione 2:03 So a excited to have AWS back in the house. Second, one of my favourite topics right now is about marketplace. So I’ve been referred to this as the marketplace moment. So but for our listeners and viewers that may not know you and your role and mission at AWS, Josh Greene 2:20 can you tell us a little bit more? Sure? Well, I’ve been in in sales and business development channels for 25 years here at AWS. I’ve been on staff for four and a half years. And I started as an IC, actually, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that. But I’ve built a team, and the team focuses on partners, and how to help them be successful by leveraging the AWS Marketplace. And you know, in my travels over the 25 years, and certainly the four and a half years here, I know the same thing is true, every partner wants to figure out how to grow and how to be more efficient. So that’s been our mantra since day one. And Vince Menzione 2:57 so Thomas, tell us a little bit more about that role on the marketplace development side. Sure, well, we Josh Greene 3:03 have a diverse set of partners in in our community, I specifically work with ISV partners. And for example, when I started, I worked with 10 of the most leaned in AWS Marketplace sellers, which are ISPs think snowflakes, Blanc, crowd CrowdStrike, etc. And the goal was to learn from them and develop a set of best practices about what’s working, and how to help them accelerate growth, but also see value back. And our starting point for that was always working with the partnership leader or the alliance leader that had the AWS Alliance. And then since that time, I now have a team. And there’s actually we’ve spawned different teams in different regions that have the same charter, how to help them adopt best practices to unlock value. And it’s a really fun job because we get to hire from a bunch of different backgrounds and no day is ever the same week we work with operations, finance, sales, marketing product, etc. So it’s a really diverse, you know, role in team. But we’re having a lot of fun and there’s a lot of work to be done cities Vince Menzione 4:05 see the job is maybe coming in as like a SWAT team and helping the organisation better align and maybe operationalize their marketplace strategy. Josh Greene 4:14 Yeah, so I mean, if you listen to a keynotes from Aruba, Borno, let’s say at reinvent 2023, you’ll hear you know, automation and scale, of course, you’ll hear generative AI and a number of other topics. But in order for us to be successful, we need to create automation that helps streamline Yeah, and reduce inefficient processes and replace them with efficient ones. So in terms of a SWAT team, yeah, I was a SWAT team of one when I started and, and now we have a group of people that are doing that activity, and it’s never to be something that is there for good. It’s always how do we innovate ourselves out of this job to create automation so that we can go tackle another another opportunity Vince Menzione 4:59 in You mentioned some ISPs. And we’re going to double click on those ISPs in a moment here. But it seems like your team has done pretty darn successful there. Josh Greene 5:06 Well, it’s I mean, we’re one team among many, it takes a village. So we’ve and it, there are teams, there are developers and engineers, there are partner development managers, there are customer advisory where we have a lot of different roles. My team just happens to sit directly partner facing and tends to be on the cutting edge with those partners that are leading in the most. And that’s where, frankly, that’s where we learn the most from the partners that are the most taxing, and I guess taxi equals opportunity. And, and so we’re we’re part of a really robust community here. Vince Menzione 5:39 So we’ve been talking about I’ve been calling it the marketplace moment, right? Because several things have happened. I’ve been discussing the tectonic shifts, we’ve been seeing where it’s been going on since even before COVID, the transformation, the change in buying patterns of behaviours, the millennials becoming the decision makers, the decisions being made in the lines of business, and buying happening now with clicks, right, where people don’t even want to talk with the salesperson, I tap my phone three times, and a box shows up in several, several hours. So our world has changed from that perspective. And now I think, you know, we we’ve been talking, I’ve been talking about CO selling for many years, and a lot of times organisations will say, Why do I need to do cosell? Like, I’m not getting any value from my hyper scalar partner? Like, why should I go do that. But I want to latch on to this durable cloud budget conversation, it seems that the realisation if you will, right, that AWS has a tremendous, or a captive relationship with the executive suite, within these organisations, enterprises, public sector agencies in the light, that there’s this huge durable budget available. And you know, recent estimates are that they’re over $340 billion and durable cloud budgets amongst the three hyperscalers. And then take layer on top of that kind of the ease of partnering with other organisations. We’re seeing, we’re seeing so much of a pattern now. And we’ll talk a little bit more about the success that your organisation has that. But this realisation that marketplace, is really a pathway to greater success, a working with hyperscale, like AWS, but also partnering amongst other organisations, building multi party offers and approaches to the customer to surround the customer. I’d love your perspective on this. This as well, I’m going marketplace moment. Yeah, I Josh Greene 7:36 feel really, really fortunate. So I, I had been looking for an opportunity, and had tried to do this with a prior employer to the old term was cloud services broker. But that was really the first coming in my opinion of what we became this Cloud Marketplace. And we tried and failed. And the reason why I was attracted to AWS was having tried and failed before at a startup at a you know, another company is I thought, if anyone is going to figure this out, in my opinion, it’s AWS, because of what you just, you know, some of the elements that that desire to disrupt, to be infinitely customer obsessed, but also with this tailwind of customers that are putting their trust in AWS and making these commitments. So I don’t know if I would use the word, you know, captive audience, I would say an audience that’s been around with with our with our customers, but that’s been a tremendous tailwind and and turning that into, like, what does that meant for marketplace, it’s been huge. It’s been an opportunity where one of the first fundamental pillars, you know, of our value proposition was that and how to leverage cloud commitments to help our partners be successful. But you know, our value proposition is really, you know, expanded past that. And one little story about this is I was really challenged with how to convey this message to the executive team at one of our ISPs or to the board to convince them a while why to take this leap. This is going back now for years. And one of our business partners told me said, Hey, I explained it to them this way. And you should try it too, is there’s a there’s a, the cloud committed spend budget is a tremendous amount has tremendous gravity, and it, it’s pulling dollars into it. And either as an organisation, we can fight this gravity, or we can benefit from this gravity. And what I thought was particularly interesting about that example was in some of the best examples of where I’ve seen us go from nothing to something very material is that’s independent of whether we might have an AWS service that could be competitive without offer. So some of our most successful partners that we work with may have a product or a service that’s actually competitive to one of our own, you know, take MongoDB or snowflake, they’re phenomenally successful with marketplace and have made that decision that the the opportunity to tap into that That cloud committed spend and marketplace as a mechanism to reach customers and CO selling as part of that, as you mentioned, it is too powerful. And we’ve gotten a lot better with it over time. So those are the way I think about it is this has been a huge advantage for us. And you know, and we’ve gotten a lot better at partnering. Vince Menzione 10:18 I love the term gravity in this conversation as well. Do you think it depicts it properly as you think about AI? Right? Because I do think there’s a tremendous amount of gravity. And you know, you and I were in an event that was very partner centric. But really, organisations need to backup and take a look at the bigger picture, right, and the gravity amongst the three hyper scalars AWS being the most prominent and the largest across those, those hyper scalars in terms of AI as it means it means that you’re having the conversations at the C suite level, not necessarily in the line of business. But you’re you’re negotiating at that CFO level, the organisation, is that right? Josh Greene 10:54 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s a CFO, it’s a company level decision that’s happening depending upon where an organisation wants to invest in the cloud. And I think it’s not just one thing. So we talked about, you know, cloud commitment, a lot of these pieces have to come together. So the marketplace had to mature in terms of feature sets, the partner programmes you were mentioned in August, and the partnership leadership summit, I remember I ran into someone that we both know, Dorothy Copeland, who I reached out to, I want to say 14 years ago, when I was with Softchoice, where I was for 13 years, and tried to engage with Dorothy, who was just building a partner programme at AWS at that time. And I remember and Melville we like we had a laugh about this be a little miffed that AWS didn’t have time for me. And when I ran into Dorothy just last August, she said, Well, we actually didn’t have a programme at that time. So it wasn’t like I didn’t want to work with you. I just didn’t have a mechanism to do it. That was in 2011. Let’s see 2011. And look at us now. So it’s really just in the last, you know, whatever, 13 years, it’s come in incredible distance. And that’s, that’s another thing that we’ve benefited from. Vince Menzione 12:05 How about this ease of partnering, right? I think about surrounding the customer and we were talking about Jay McBain a little bit earlier, Jay McBain comes up and just about every conversation these days, but yeah, he likes to talk about the seats at the table. And I like to think about it from the customer centric perspective, the customer isn’t just buying a cloud, it’s not just buying a security solution. It’s maybe solving a business need or requirement. And that requires maybe several different organisations coming together to solve for that. And what I see happening with marketplace we used to talk about when I was in Microsoft back in my day there, we used to talk about this thing called partnering to partner. And we we get two organisations together and try and go sell something or solve a solution for a solution need for a customer. It seems to me that marketplace automates that process, in many respects. Would you agree? Well, I Josh Greene 12:56 think I think it can automate it. It can, let’s say it’s kind of lubricate that process in terms of how it like for a variety of reasons. You mentioned that there might be a cloud spend commit, you know, in place, well, that means that there may actually be a in in place identified economic buyer, that a third party who’s trying to sell a solution, you know, doesn’t have visibility or access into Yeah, I’d say the development and the growth of our channel business via the CPO programme that we have to embrace a channel partner. There’s a lot of work that’s being done with the GSI, you know, on that as well. So I think Jay said something like there’s eight seats around the table at any specific deal. I don’t I don’t know the exact number was, but I think we we can be a kind of strain that runs through through all of them. And it every situation is different. Every you know, customer scenario is different in terms of who has influence and who’s driving that opportunity. But Marketplace is a bit of a commerce engine underpinning that is is a concept that we’re aware of and trying to extend. Vince Menzione 14:04 Yeah, I would agree with you there and the lubricant of that, helping that helping bring your stitch. I like to use the term stitching it all together. Josh Greene 14:12 Did you better I like stitch you better. Vince Menzione 14:14 So after your last earnings report, and congratulations on a successful quarter, another successful quarter was estimated that AWS had roughly $155 billion in DrupalCon budgets. And and that the tribulation of that, you know, having the largest share is what I would say. But also AWS may be coming from the retail side of things was early in terms of a marketplace strategy seems like the other two were maybe further further behind on that. What would you say about first Josh Greene 14:44 of all, there are others that are far more qualified than I am to talk about, you know, our earnings in the growth of the cloud committed budget, but what I can tell you is in my observation coming in versus an outsider four and a half years ago was it takes some acclimatised zing to AWS culture, and AWS culture is rooted in Amazon culture. And so that notion of, we have leadership principles, and you hear people talk about them, but they are very much alive and well. And the first one that rules them all, is customer obsession. So if you are, if you are someone who is customer obsessed, and you’re understanding what a customer’s problems are, and you’re seeking to solve them, the byproduct of that is they you are in trust of another leadership principle. And they reward you with a commitment. And that’s a that becomes a durable cloud commitment. But that’s based on trust. So I think the Amazon culture certainly influenced this dramatically, as well as what worked in the, in the Amazon marketplace. And what’s working over here, how much third party versus how much first party services are being sold, and how big is the mark is the opportunity for free the market opportunity for each of those things as it pertains to third party software, or data or services, etc. So I think, you know, the fact that AWS was imbued with a lot of people that had Amazon culture and brought that over, it’s still very much alive and well, and something we talked about all the time. Vince Menzione 16:13 If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I built growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders ISV, sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is, it’s noisy, I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard, we’re getting ready to open the doors early at a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder and innovator or a leader, visit our website. Again, that market leadership, and in fact 2023 was probably a seminal point for marketplaces, I would say right, we went into the year with some predictions, I was hearing predictions at the beginning of 2023. By Canalis, that by 2025, by the end of 2025, we’d see $45 billion flow through marketplaces. Jamie Baynes specifically said that they under call that number exact and he expects that number to be reached by the end of this year. And about 80% of that is going to flow through the three hyperscalers. But the the total aggregator of marketplaces it’s 45. It’s also was a big year for you mentioned some names in particular. But some of the organisations that you worked with reached a billion dollars with AWS and marketplace transactions, right. CrowdStrike and snowflake are among those organisations. What can you say there about where this is all headed? Josh Greene 18:25 Well, I, I still think we’re so early on. So whereas it’s important to look at a milestone and yeah, like crowd strikes of reaching a billion dollars, and to enjoy that for a moment. But also, they’re they’re such a massive Tam, for what we’re doing in so much untapped ground out there that acknowledge that moment is, is interesting, but there’s so much more to be done. And I just think those milestones are exciting and more partners, seeing the value of marketplace and wanting to lean and make this successful, encourages the whole community to move faster together. And that means that buyers are becoming more savvy and learning how to leverage this, it means that sellers ISPs are and as well as channel partners and GSIs are seeing this as well. And there’s in there’s other there’s data providers, etc, that are participating. So, to me, you look at it and you say okay, infrastructure ISDS we’re the first that that might have been born in the cloud. We’re the first to really embrace this. Think about what how much more potential there is outside of that. So in my kind of newish rebate, I get to work with some other partners like Salesforce and ServiceNow. So the recent announcements of them getting listed in working with marketplace are really exciting. And those are kind of what we would call you know, business application providers. And then the next frontier will be the industry vertical partners that we have. So there’s always something else and so when I hear the estimates, I get really excited about it as You buy team in terms of okay, but one one day at a time, this is a marathon, and I have we, we need to, we need to take this, this opportunity and maximise it every day. Vince Menzione 20:09 So I’d love to double click here for a moment, right? You help some of these organisations will come fled fledglings at the time, right, go to this big number. What did you see when you work with those organisations? What were the attributes that you saw, that made them accelerate more rapidly than maybe other organisations? Sure. Josh Greene 20:33 Well, that there was certainly the existence of a strong partnership with AWS already. And actually, someone that I work with very closely your name’s Jen Valverde built a framework that we call characteristics of a successful seller. And this framework helped us identify what were the best partners doing that could be repeated and taught to other partners. And as it pertains to, you know, CrowdStrike, and snowflake, they saw and recognised that their buyers were also AWS customers. And therefore, they early on identified that, you know, I remember working with one of the folks at CrowdStrike, who said, like, we have a, we have a play called Path to budget that I run, which is how I teach my sellers, how and why to engage with marketplace in AWS to go access that cloud committed spin budget. So in that example, CrowdStrike had a great relationship with AWS and still do, and they had an empowered activated leader, and Jessica Alexander, who really drove that internally. So without him and empowered change agent, nothing’s going to happen. And I think, you know, in partnership leaders, we talk about this, a lot of I know, part of your role is to elevate the the chief partner officer up there with the CMO and the CRO, etc. If, if they don’t, if they can’t build that kind of clout, and don’t have those relationships, this won’t get in this won’t go anywhere. So convincing sales leadership to buy in, it takes some effort. And you have to be really thoughtful about where you go first, curating the scenario or where we’re going to engage. So you can build some momentum. Sure, you can demonstrate results. And then you get you get it you build momentum from there. So Vince Menzione 22:22 path and budget. And was this person at the C suite level? Was it a CRO level, Josh Greene 22:27 individual, no, a senior director, a senior director, but but how to say, but understood also where the roadmap needed to go for CrowdStrike to help embrace and protect cloud workloads. So this was these things came together really, really nicely. And that said, there was also some deep marketplace expertise on that team, and a willingness to, to experiment, that the status quo may not be what they what they wanted, in order to continue to propel their success. Vince Menzione 23:02 So what do you see because I still see some resistance in some quarters on from ISVs. On marketplace, right? Especially those who have very strong traditional channels. What do you see from those who resist the change? What are you seeing from them? Josh Greene 23:17 Well, I think, to some extent, we have a little bit of a luxury to have working with my team does of working with the ones that have raised their hand or are on the on the fence or want to learn about how to make this be successful. But as evidenced by the recent announcements, you know, we there are a lot of the hardware partners that are newer to marketplace we’ve been working on for a long time. This doesn’t happen overnight. And certainly the larger the organisation, sometimes the more difficult it is. That’s not always true. But I think if you look at compelling events, and you’ve mentioned this in some of your other podcasts in terms of things that are compelling, that are changing the way that business gets done, you know, marketplace is definitely one of those generative AI is definitely one of those. And we’re in an area where those two things can come together. And if if, if there are leaders in place, that aren’t willing to read the tea leaves and look at what the data suggests, I would be a bit concerned. And I think there’s a lot of pressure that happens to from the board to say, you know, what is our marketplace strategy? What is our AWS strategy where perhaps that conversation wasn’t as prevalent, you know, four or five years ago. Vince Menzione 24:33 I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers All of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost in my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five free travel packs with your first purchase, go to drink a G one.com, forward slash Vince n, that’s drink a G one.com. Forward slash Vince and check them out. So it’s getting driven at the board level. These are board level conversations now as opposed to maybe three, four years ago and you started off in this journey? Josh Greene 25:34 Well, I think it depends because you know, this, this is your dramatic change. So depending upon the size of the organisation, depending on where they are, if they’re a public company, private company, we work with a lot of, you know, startups as well that are kind of that are coming up. And they’re they’re, like I said there, they can be a bit more agile that way. But it’s a big bet. And what we’ve learned in 2022, and 2023, was, when I started off, I talked about what every partner wants is to grow and become more efficient. I think we shifted towards the efficiency conversation over the last couple years where it was this grow at all costs, you know, notion before. So I think I think our value proposition on path to budget and other things like that have really come to light given this. So there was some some consternation that will slow down in spending lead to a slowdown in marketplace. And actually, the reverse is true, I think we’ve seen an acceleration as a result of it. So I would not necessarily have forecasted that. But when our partners started saying, we need a more efficient way to go to market, we want to experiment and try with AWS and marketplace. That was really exciting. And that’s the thing, there’s inefficiency in the CO selling methodology or the process. Right. Would you agree there? Yeah, I think so. And well, absolutely. I agree. It streamlines so much. Right. You remember the old days of CO selling, you know, you have a piece of paper, you have a piece of paper, we’d upload all the information, you figured out that we co sell something together as opposed to this much more streamlined digital approach to the process. Well, it’s been it’s been clunky ever since, you know, account mapping days, way back when. And I participated. Yeah, the spreadsheets, the the, we sculpt the hug and chug where you get together with another sales rep. And you compare notes it was it was wildly inefficient. And I say one of the things that’s been prioritised by the partner engineering team has been the investment in automation and tools to streamline that process. So there are tools that we have offered that are going to first party services to facilitate that. But what’s also really exciting is that and this goes to your notion of, you know, the reliance on partners is there’s a whole community of partners now that do just that. And I can name a bunch of that. But the fact that there’s a whole this, this whole network of partners that exist that didn’t before that are really driving this increasing scale, and they innovate really fast is exciting. And that’s, to me, the hallmark of a healthy of a healthy community is that these third parties are really influential. And so we need to make sure that we we we work closely with them and support them. Vince Menzione 28:15 I totally agree. And we’re I think we both know some of those organisations. Josh Greene 28:19 Yes, we do. We work with them all the time. So what about our Vince Menzione 28:23 audience? If they want to engage with they want to optimise their success working with you in AWS? What do they need to go do differently or think about this year? 2024? Josh Greene 28:35 I think I remember, John Kotter was a was a leading change expert. And maybe like 20 years ago, I read his book leading change. And he had an eight step model. But the first element, I always remember the first three that are like creating urgency, you know, building a coalition, and creating establishing a strategic vision. And I come back to this, you know, 15 years later, but if there’s no urgency, nothing’s going to happen. If you don’t have the right Coalition, which probably involves product marketing, sales operations, and the partner teams working together, perhaps others like this is you’re going to flame out. And if you don’t have a vision about what you’re trying to deliver, like it, like we just talked about, gone are the let’s experiment with everything and you know, of three years ago, we we need to know or try to estimate what the light is at the end of the tunnel or the pot of gold, whatever you want to call it. But if you don’t do those three things, you’re going to be in trouble. And that I would say, and similarly we’ve developed tools like that framework I was talking about to say, we’ve got a step by step process that you can use that won’t ensure success, but will improve your probability of success and at a minimum will help you avoid the pitfalls that you know others might have fell Have you know before, which is which doesn’t do Good Friday one? Vince Menzione 30:03 Can you double click with me on that those those steps those tools for success? Sure. Josh Greene 30:08 So in our what we call the if we’re talking about the framework, I mean, the first one is, you know, you have to create. So after you’ve established a vision, and you have a coalition, you have to list in marketplace, what your customers want to buy, want to buy in the way that they want to buy it. And that’s in a in a b2b scenario, and the way that your sales teams are selling it today. So I guess what launching that brand net new product on marketplace is not something that I would advise to most ISPs out there. And certainly, partners like CrowdStrike, and snowflake, haven’t followed that that model is so because I’m trying to remove as many variables as I can in that process, because I’m trying to win the hearts and minds not just of customers, but of the sellers in the ISP organisation, if they don’t, if they don’t see value in this, and it’s, it’s going to happen some other way, or it’s not going to be recognised their quota or whatever else. We’ve all been through this, like, they’ll never do it. And I understand why it was a seller for you know, you know, 10 years. So I think that’s the first one and then, you know, do we have an empowered change agent identifying the right, you know, leadership buy in is wildly successful? Are you participating in the relevant partner programmes? Are you are you in the APN? Are you part of the accelerate programme? Are you participating in the workload migration programme, but we saw a correlation partners that were investing in things like programme participation and competencies did better. And it makes sense, this framework isn’t, you know, rocket science here, but the more they’re invested, the better off that will do. So that those are some of the other steps that are that are in the framework. And by the way, we’re happy to share this framework with with anybody that asks for it, it’s out. But I appreciate that we Vince Menzione 31:58 might ask for a link to that. Or maybe you share it with them. shownotes would be wonderful this year that Josh, so really great learnings here from you. I really appreciate having you on today. I have a favourite question though. I asked almost every guest, it is a favourite. you’re hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past. In fact, one guest said the future they gave me guests in the future. Who would you invite to this dinner party? And we could also discuss where we’re going to have this dinner party? Do you have a favourite location? When would you invite and why? Oh, Josh Greene 32:35 this question i. So this, this would be a minor all in the past. And that reflects that I’m a history buff. And by the way, I will I will disclose that they they might be aspirational, that they’d want to have dinner with me. But since it’s my dinner party, and I get to invite them, I’m gonna have at it. I read a book a long time ago about John Adams, the second president, and I just, he would be at the table with me. And the reason why is, you know, I just think about the impact of what our founding fathers did, not just on the US, but the diplomacy, how they navigated a crazy scenario, and just the lasting impact of that would just be fascinating. So I’m, I’m fascinated with that that time period. And is just that notion of building something new. I love building things. And am I read that book, I’d really like to meet that would have been amazing. The other two, I, I might, I’d say MLK Jr. would be an inspirational person for me to be I passion and energy. You can tell hopefully, by the way I talk about, you know, our business, I’m a passionate person. And I think that notion of overcoming, I think I read that that MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times, and the determination and perseverance. And frankly, what I think we need a little bit more of these days is something that I that I truly admire. And my wife would laugh at the third one, and it’s it’s not Taylor Swift, but I would say I haven’t necessarily committed enough to service. And in terms of someone who could inspire me to do that, in my career moving forward, I would say Mother Teresa is welcome to this dinner party to set a good example for everyone about what we what we can do and what we can achieve. And I think it’d be a really interesting conversation at that dinner table. Vince Menzione 34:27 What a cool and eclectic list, right? I mean, John Adams, I’m always I’m fascinated with the Founding Fathers and how they brought together they went to Philadelphia that started off with a correspondence, right and then they started congregating in Philadelphia around a common purpose, which is amazing. MLK, Martin Luther King. The I Have a Dream speech brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it. So huge fan as well. And then Mother Teresa. Wow. I might have to maybe I can come bring up a beverage or reserve, what do you think? Can I do, John, you’re more than welcome. I Josh Greene 35:02 think I would rely on others to help, you know, guide that conversation. I think I’d be the observer just just watching and absorbing this and hopefully being more inspired. But I think we would we would do well with some dinner parties with with those three, any Vince Menzione 35:21 special location? Josh Greene 35:22 That’s a good question. It feels like it would be appropriate to do it in. In the Northeast on the West Coast, you know, person so I don’t I don’t love the cold weather. But maybe it maybe maybe you mentioned Philadelphia, maybe that’s the place to do it. Vince Menzione 35:38 Yeah. I’d love it. I love it. I used to live in the Philadelphia area, I could recommend some great restaurants if we want to host it there. So Josh, you you’ve been a lot of it’s been you’ve been a great guest. You’ve been a lot of fun to spend some time with today. I really love what you’re doing. So happy that you chose to come to ultimate guide to partnering to talk about our favourite topic and look forward to maybe having you again in the future. Maybe you could be a five time or like Jay McBain and some of our other guests. So, but for our listeners, this audience of listeners and viewers now what can they do differently? If they want to reach out to you if they if they haven’t built their strategy yet? Is there a way for them to reach out to you? Yeah, well, I Josh Greene 36:22 It’s I get reached out to on LinkedIn quite a bit. I’d say there’s a every AWS partner. Most AWS partners have some type of a named resource to get engaged with, that’s really the gateway and they’re the true quarterbacks that leverage this. So my content you know, I’m in partnership leaders. That’s one way to reach me, I’m on LinkedIn is another way to reach feet or through the partner development management organisation is another way to reach be and not just me, but the team that I have the privilege of leading and then the content that we all collectively participated in building because that’s to me that’s that’s what it’s about. Appreciate your time today, Josh, Vince Menzione 37:02 thanks for joining ultimate guide Department. Josh Greene 37:04 Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it. Vince Menzione 37:11 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering

Apr 8, 2024 • 44min

216 – From Startup to Success: Unlocking Cloud Marketplace Growth Strategies

Dexter Hardy Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Dexter Hardy, President and Chief Technology Officer of Integral, a company that brings over two decades of IT expertise to helping companies massively shift to Microsoft Azure. Last year alone, Ntegral’s over 300 Marketplace offerings drove over 100 million hours of Microsoft Azure consumption. In this Ultimate Guide to Partnering episode, he shares his journey from SI to ISV success, unlocking his cloud marketplace growth strategies. From cloud migration to fostering partnerships in the tech industry, Dexter delves into key topics, including productization, brand building, and community focus for startups, with a focus on leadership, innovation, and adapting to technological shifts. In this Ultimate Guide to Partnering episode, Dexter shares invaluable insights on mastering marketplaces, nurturing personal growth, and orchestrating successful partnerships. This episode is packed with actionable strategies for business growth and navigating the ever-evolving tech landscape. Don’t miss it. What You’ll Learn Partnering and marketplace success with Microsoft ISV. (0:02) Cloud migration, marketplace solutions, and customer needs. (4:58) Business growth and partnerships in the tech industry. (9:32) Productization, brand building, and community focus for a tech startup. (13:53) Leadership, community building, and tech innovation. (20:21) Personal growth, leadership, and company success. (28:31) Mastering the marketplace, nurturing family, and successful partnerships. (34:22) Partner experience and event planning. (41:54) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube Announcing Ultimate Partner Experience Ever wonder what you could achieve with the right partners by your side? Dive into the Ultimate Partner Experience Community (UPX) and discover a world brimming with possibilities! 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The world is your oyster at UPX, let’s explore it together! Come Join Us I’m thrilled to welcome you to this journey. Let’s navigate, thrive, and redefine success in the tech partnership landscape together. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos Summary Keywords organisation, focus, marketplace, cloud, microsoft, partner, azure, solution, customers, adding, create, build, part, companies, talk, year, isp, centre, product, isv Vince Menzione 0:02 Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And I’m finding this buyer intent you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant every day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince BenZion, your host, and my mission is to empower every individual partner in organisation to achieve their greatest results through successful partnering. Today, we have a special guest here in the studio. He’s an individual and entrepreneur that I’ve gotten to know well over the last few months since he joined us in Dallas at our live event. Dexter Hardy is the President and CTO of integral Pinnacle Award winning Microsoft ISV. Dexter, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to be here. Vince, I am so excited to have you here in the studio in Boca Raton. So glad you could join us today for our viewers and our listeners. And we got to know each other at our event, our live event in November in Dallas, Texas. And I was excited to have you here because you’re an amazing organisation on a journey here. And I was hoping to have you share with our listeners, all the great things that are happening and integral and the work that you do. I invite you here specifically because we talk about marketplaces in this marketplace moment and how organisations need to adapt to the change. And your organisation has been a marketplace first ISV from day one. In fact, I was hoping you could share with us first your value and how you got here. Yeah, so I’d have to back up a little bit to say that for 20 years prior to our pivot, we were a small si focusing on app development, data centre moves, you know, supporting organisations across the full spectrum COVID happened and that was the you know, the tip of the spear for us for pivoting. It forced us to rethink what we do we call it consulting to Dotto, how do you do more with less really embodying in embodying that as an organisation. And so we took the IP that we were really good at with our customers created an accelerator in the Azure Marketplace, we released our first solution 2021. And the rest is history as they say. So you start out as a services organisation, you create a product, you create a marketplace solution. And you have a category and perhaps you’re a category of one. And I’ve heard you use the term infrastructure as code as a service. And I’m not technical. So I was hoping for our listeners and our viewers. In fact, you could take us through what that is, and why it’s so compelling to our marketplace right now. Okay, so I’ll start with a non technical explanation of infrastructures, code of service. So whenever you’re trying to do anything in maths, you want to have an assembly line process. So if it’s building a house, or a chocolate factory, Henry Ford, Henry Ford, you want to build the first car? Right? The first one, you build that prototype? Yeah, you know, there’s a lot of things that change you can, you need to build special materials. But if you’re trying to put them out in mass, you need a repeatable process that can guarantee at the end of a certain process, you have an outcome. Yep. infrastructure as code as a service focuses on the outcome of what happens in the cloud. So infrastructure is code. So I’m gonna getting a little more technical as we go into this infrastructure is code is you’ll look at Ansible. You’ll look at TerraForm, Microsoft has ARM templates, AWS uses cloud formation. But those are all technologies in and of themselves, that people are, you know, a mile deep in and you have to really understand, we’re saying, Don’t worry about that. Focus on the outcome. Our platform will get you there through if you can fill out a webform you can deploy to the cloud. And I love the example you use with me when we first met you know, we talked about a specific ISP, a very significant security ISP will go nameless at this point, because we haven’t asked for their permission to use their name. This organisation was running exclusively on AWS is cloud. They knew they needed to get over to Microsoft. In fact, they signed an agreement and started a co selling strategy. They were building out a marketplace offering and they weren’t there yet. And it was difficult for them to get from point A to point B, correct. And they found you Dexter Hardy 4:58 and they they click It was a quick and by type of situation for them. And since they have moved all those, they’ve migrated all of that technology over to Azure. And now they’re consuming an incredible amount, we will throw in a real dollars at it, but it’s an incredible amount of Azure based on the work they did with INTEGRO. Absolutely. And so you know, when you look at this, we call it a cloud lift and shift, right? Yep. So if you’re on AWS, a lot of vendors will start with Amazon’s version of Linux, Amazon Linux, no harm, no foul, until you’re ready to leave. And now you’re like, Okay, we got to rewrite we have there’s hooks here. There’s a there’s a huge it only runs on Amazon. Well, I did all around him. Yeah. And so, you know, they were looking at having to have their team go in, reverse it, you know, kind of look at the architecture and had to we rewrite this entire thing. And we were like, No, we ported Amazon Linux to Azure, we show you, we’ll show you how to integrate that into your current CI CD pipeline. And you can run it and test it. So instead of taking, you know, 18 months, they are able to do it in a couple of months, right. So you it cuts your time to market Vince Menzione 6:21 to a third less than half. It ensures. And again, we focus on the outcome. Like nobody cares about tech. I mean, I’m in tech, but nobody knows about the intricacies or want to get get right mile deep in it, right. They really want they’re focused on if you’re in healthcare, you want to focus on servicing your customers, you don’t want to find out like, how do we become really good IT companies. So, so you’re a digital first digital only today, but that’s going to change. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. Yep. So you have deployed all of these marketplace solutions to help organisations get various permutations of what they’re doing, and maybe one cloud or on prem or in a datacenter environment to Azure, is that the way I understand it, absolutely. Take us through that ideal customer for you, for us. So the ideal customer, so I will say there’s two paths, right, or three paths. One, you’re doing a cloud lifting shift, like our security friend who wanted to move from AWS to Azure, right? That’s one path, then if you have a data centre, you have your data centre, you’re like, hey, we need to move off of this legacy equipment into the cloud. That’s a second very path. And then the third path is if you just want to innovate in the cloud, right? You don’t want to spend a whole bunch of money on hiring Azure specialists to spin up your stuff, you can start with our solutions, that’ll get you 80% of the way. And now you innovate on top of that. So I would break it out into those three. Yeah. And I think about things like Kubernetes, as well, where somebody’s maybe already in the cloud. And now they’re looking at containerization as a next step in their, their transformational journey. Absolutely. And so we really want to make sure that what we do is we meet their customers where they are. So if you’re in a data centre, and you have VMs, running, you can spin up that same equivalent VM in the cloud. So now your team that upskilling that would have been required before. It’s really not there, because they’re dealing with like for like, it’s just a data centre in the cloud, right, as opposed to a data centre that they physically go to or whatever they were used to before. You know, we have been calling this year the marketplace moment, right? We were at our event, we had several executives, Anthony Joseph from Microsoft spoke. And it’s interesting to me the perspective because there are a lot of ISPs in the room that are still earlier in their journey, right? They started off on a different level or path. You you started marketplace, first marketplace only, in fact, as your as your approach. You don’t just have one solution. You have many solutions, right? But it serves the market that you’re trying to serve the markets that you’re trying to serve. Yep. Let’s talk about the marketplace. And also you’ve been featured ISP success we had Yvonne mentioned on the podcast, just recently. You have been spotlighted in that organisation. Talk to me about what your point of view is on this marketplace moment. So the marketplace moment is real. So if you are not Dexter Hardy 9:32 in the marketplace, you’re going to get left behind. I would say think of it in terms of we talked about cars. Yes, Ford earlier. There’s a lot of blacksmiths that were still like, you know what, I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep this. I’m gonna keep this talent and I’m gonna work on it and then nobody needed horseshoes. No, no, no, I think the marketplace is a is a pivotal moment like that, in that companies will be able to skate at a at a pace that they were were not able to do before they’ll be able to add value. Globally, like I said, when we started, we were a regional consultancy, supporting maybe three to four different states around the metro Atlanta area. Now we have customers in over 100 countries. Yeah. So you know that, that changes the playing field. He changes your reach her Sure, absolutely. And it changes the trajectory of your company. And I’ll share I know, I know, some numbers, but I think you said somewhere in the neighbourhood of 19,000 customers now. Absolutely. So you go from a handful, a small amount of customers. And now you have 19,000 customers in 120 countries, how many countries the number changes, there’s only a I think there’s like 187, the last time I checked now the reason I looked at that number is because we were we were getting close. I’m like how many countries is there? So last time I checked, we were a little bit over 150 ish. But you know, and this has all been in over a fairly short period of time since 2001. That was March 2021 2021, which, you know, has been through we talked about these tectonic shifts, how COVID accelerated things. Vince Menzione 11:24 If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view, I sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I build growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders ISV, sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is, it’s noisy, I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard, we’re getting ready to open the doors early at a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder, and innovator or leader, visit our website. If you have been, we talked about being featured as a Microsoft partner, have you also been part of you’ve gotten to know a lot of the people in the partnerships world at Microsoft and outside of Microsoft. You’ve also participated in countless sell, say, accelerators and training. What was the biggest challenge you needed to overcome? And what was the one piece of wisdom you share with other Microsoft partners looking to achieve what you achieved? Okay, so I will start with the accelerators, the very first thing they say is what is your superpower? Yes. And so, you know, coming from a world where you’re an SI you don’t you’re doing a lot of different things. But what is the one thing that you would say, I’ll stand up against anybody in the world. And that’s our, that’s our, that’s our go to what you do differently, better, Dexter Hardy 13:29 faster, stronger, better than anyone in the world. So we focus. So being in those accelerator programmes being a part of that executive coaching. And then thinking about it in terms of a billion dollar organisation like Microsoft, how can you add value, right? So you can’t come to Microsoft and say, We can do everything, they’re gonna look at you and say, That’s impossible. We, the scale that we were talking about is, you can’t do that as small organisation. However, if you put that in the hyperscalers Cloud Marketplace, turn on a digital first motion. Now you’re adding value at the scale of Microsoft, right? Because there are, I don’t remember the final numbers where there’s like 4 million or more active users in the Azure Marketplace. Yeah, somewhere in that number. Yeah. And so now you’ve, if you’re adding value at that scale, just do this the law of large numbers if you’re focusing on 10% of those 40,000 customers, that are now transacting with you, and again, we’re just starting to scratch the surface we have 19,000 We still have a lot to go but I think that’s where if I were a small organisation, I would focus on what is your superpower, understand, what is your key differentiator and then amplified Vince Menzione 15:00 that. And then what you’ll do is what we’re able to do now is now you can actually go in and start back, adding on those additional services if you want to, because you’re the tip of the spear isn’t, hey, let’s go through the sound, let’s go in and talk to the customer, let’s understand where you are, you know, and there’s all these different motions you have to go through. Now our customers are in the marketplace, we see the value. So digital transaction and they’re moving. In your help, you’re creating value, you’re doing that value creation is what I would say your organisation does differently. Absolutely. So let’s talk about that. Like, what do you think you do differently? Like, what are the things that you were challenged with? And what did you apply? What were the principles you applied to get to get to where you are today? Dexter Hardy 15:49 So the biggest challenge that I was faced with is figuring out how to productize that IP, because that’s going to be your biggest challenge as a company who’s implementing? Like, how do you come up with the process to create the factory? Yes? How do you do that? So for, for me, it was a scenario of just pick one, like you have to pick a area to go. So again, around the focus, pick an area that you’ve added the most value in as an organisation, and then productize, that one, in the process of creating that product, you’re going to you’re going to learn about the marketplace, you’re going to learn about your internal process, you’ll see what the value is, but then go ahead and put it in the marketplace. Don’t do analysis paralysis, because the market place will tell you if it’s valuable. Right. Right. We put our solutions out there when we first pivoted our website had nothing about our products. But you know what? Because we put it in the marketplace and the product added value people downloaded it anyway, found it. People found it. What was that first solution? The first solution was actually SQL server running on Linux SQL Server on Linux. Interesting. And that was that was that was popular, I guess, for lack of a better term. Yeah. So people were because when Microsoft moved away from the windows, and it was core windows, but it still was running a little more cycles than a lot of companies wanted. They had there had other resources running on Linux. So they were like, Okay, our teams, can we move our have this SQL server running on Linux? And so that was our first product. We actually created a container out of it. And we had some pretty big name, petroleum companies and other financial institutions that, you know, vetted out and like, Okay, this is, this is the right thing. So you help them optimise performance of SQL Server. Yeah, moving into Linux, and then moving in into a container approach, right? That was the biggest. Vince Menzione 18:13 So I want to do a deep dive here we met, because you were part of the black partner growth initiative. And Microsoft for male Mitchell introduced us, in fact, another good friend of both of ours, yep. As a black entrepreneur and CEO. At that, I want to dive here on like, challenges that might be you faced in the business, and in creating a company and brand. Okay. So Dexter Hardy 18:38 I would say it’s going to be across the board, regardless of race or ethnicity. Focus on value first, you first, the fact that you have the bat, I’m a black owner, that’s an additional attribute to how we think about what we do as a company. But the first thing is, are we adding value? And so that’s at the premises of everything that we do whenever we create a solution. The second piece is the challenge. Well, it’s brand building. And so what I would recommend to a lot of companies, a lot of the people that we supported in our MSI role were marketing agencies. And so if you look at 10, if you look at the top 10 companies, most marketing companies want to work with two through 10, not one through 10. Because you can show how you’re improving in any of those other positions. If you’re number one, the only thing that you can see is down if you go down, alright, so So I would say, and in that you have to build a community, you have to build a network and they call it a groundswell approach. So we focused on the groundswell approach we focused on DevOps, we focus on the people that were like us, they would resonate with our message, they would understand the problem, we would they would, that they were faced with and challenge. And so by staying focused on that, staying focused on building that community, that is the thing that gives you the ability to now build your brand, because it’is genuine, right? You, you understand the challenges they face with the things that they were doing on a day to day basis. Vince Menzione 20:29 You and I we first met had a car very early in our conversations, you talked about generational leadership. And perhaps and maybe this is where the whole black end entrepreneur and CEO piece comes in. I have a sense about I’d love to learn more about your personal mission, professional mission, personal mission, and where you hope to take the world. Dexter Hardy 20:52 Okay, so I’ll go back to statement. A leader is someone who creates leaders that builds other leaders. So if you look at the lineage around that, if it just ends with you, were you really a leader? Yeah. Right. But if you’ve created again, creating that process of now you’re instilling in someone else, if you’re a leader, then you’re going to push it three generations down, or three. That’s what creates a legacy. That’s what creates something that’s going to last a lifetime. Or several, right, because it’s no longer resting with you, you’re investing in someone else. You’re seeing, you know, their human, the human traits, and you’re, you’re helping them become the best version of themselves. So Vince Menzione 21:44 where are you taking integral? And how do you bring that mission? And this generational leadership to fruition? Okay, so, Dexter Hardy 21:55 first and foremost, we focus on community building. So we’re an ally of women and cloud, we’re part of bcpa. And we’re plugged into our local community. So first and foremost, staying a part of the community is key. For me. The second piece is we actually invest in giving scholarships and or internships, to help people learn technology and understand, you know, a lot of people if you can’t, if you’ve never seen a person do it, then you don’t know that it’s possible. So the more people that we can create that are women, minorities, that are in tech and being successful, now you’re inspiring someone else to do those types of things. And so where I see that that’s, that’s building on top of that community that’s building that legacy. But then the third piece of that is, Well, where did it take integral? I think, by building that community continuing to build on that groundswell. It only elevates us as an organisation, because now it’s no longer we’re trying to sell you on, we’re good. No, we’re genuinely wanting to see everyone in a better place. The second piece is we’re adding value, because we understand your issue. So now it’s, again, you’re not choosing us because, hey, this is the latest, greatest thing that’s out there. It is pretty cool. But it’s really to address the issue that you’re faced with on a day to day. So you’re Vince Menzione 23:30 a category of one today, you’re doing something that I don’t think any other organisation is doing with these solutions. You’re driving through the marketplace. You’ve got 819 1000. Now, customers, you’re driving, can we use real numbers here to talk about Azure consumption? Hundreds 100 million hours of Azure consumption? Yeah, so was astounding. Yeah. So we, Dexter Hardy 23:54 through December of last year, we actually had customers consuming about 100 million Azure consumption hours crazy. And this first quarter, we’re on target to be within the next six months, they’re going to do 100 million in six months, our goal on Vince Menzione 24:10 the path to be 200 million this year. So what I’m thinking maybe possibly, Dexter Hardy 24:14 well, we’re actually trending a beat to be around three to 400 million by the end Vince Menzione 24:20 of this year. So what does success look like with that? Like, where do you go from here? Dexter Hardy 24:25 So success looks like, again, just being coming from a no name brand, to actually not having to introduce yourself in the room anymore. Right? So we’ve, we’re kind of doing that within our own right within the market within the DevOps community. Now, the second piece is, well, customers, so we’re still going to stay customer focus. How do we enable you to innovate in your own field? Right, what does that look like? So that looks like our automation of our product. Right? So now you can spin this up in the cloud. Well, now you’re not spending six to nine months doing that plus another 12 months training someone, and then the technology is Oh, no, you’re starting, you know, a month earlier, six months earlier, 12 months early, and now you can focus on the innovation in your specific industry, you’re not thinking about technology problems, per se, you’re actually solving problems within your own vertical. Vince Menzione 25:37 So let’s jump into that future state. What does that look like for integral? You’re you’re taking on us on a path here, I believe, right? We’re, we’re looking at about it’s a click, click by click Try by basically today. And now you you’re saying we’re, you’re also going to help those organisations accelerate their path or their growth? Yep. What does that look like? And what are you going to be offering? Dexter Hardy 25:58 So the way we looked at that is tip of the spear. You see the value? Second thing is we’ve introduced what we call our concierge cloud. Cloud. Yeah, so concierge cloud is, you mentioned, we have about 300 solutions, that solutions that continues to grow, because we’re always, you know, things change, people are updating things so that content continues to grow. But in concierge cloud, instead of having to do each is or pay as you go, we’re saying, Hey, you get as a annual subscription, you get access to everything in the library. Plus, we give you an A technical architect to kind of help you understand how to both maximise your spin in the cloud, how to maximise your lift and shift, whatever those things are. And then we add some additional, like customer success, you know, just making sure handholding. So it goes from, hey, this transactional based relationship to a more back to what we did before more consulting consulting advisory. Vince Menzione 27:05 And we talked about these 18,000 or 19,000 customers? Where does this apply? Give me a scenario give me a customer scenario, like applied to like, I know, we were just talking with one of the big, large global s eyes here just a little bit before we started our conversation. Give me an example that might apply there. Dexter Hardy 27:23 Yeah. So if you’re a global Si, right, the the top three things that you’re going to be faced with is being competitive in price, right? upskilling your resources, right, you can’t have a bench because now you’re into your bra, and then product product profitability, or, in this instance, your consulting profitability. So what did you say you’re going to do? Can you actually do it for the amount that’s on that? So? Right. And so again, focusing on that outcome, our solution gives you one, the upskilling component, I’ll focus on one at a time upskilling component. So instead of now having to go in spin, you know, months training, and then getting their feet wet on whatever the new technology is, they can actually get the outcome completed. And then learn at a small edit at a at their own pace, as to like if you’re moving to Azure, you deployed in Azure. And now you can learn the nuances of Azure without impacting the delivery time on the project. Vince Menzione 28:31 So maybe I take one workload, and I move it to Azure. And I’ve learned from him what to learn from that. And then I moved the next workload is that is that sort of the example you’re setting here? So Dexter Hardy 28:41 So the example is, it’s that, but is that on steroids, because again, if you’re an SI, you’re doing multiple workloads, and we have 300 solutions. So you can pick and choose if it’s databases, if it’s, you know, other web applications, containers, Kubernetes, those things become, you can, you can focus on one if you want, and then get that you gain the benefit of you could actually reduce the amount of people on your team that is required in order to deliver the same quality. Right? So and that’s where that IP, that’s where our thought was put into the product of, you know, as a technical architect, you’re sitting there, you’re trying to figure out, well, you know, here’s the best practices for the deployment. Well, because that’s baked into the solution. Now. That’s time that you get back. Right? Time is time dollars. time equals money. So Vince Menzione 29:40 you’re Yeah, so you’re accelerating my like, time to creation, correct. I value cycle. I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson. That’s drink 80 one.com. Forward slash Vinson, check them out. So Dexter, you strike me as someone deeply centred and purposeful. In fact, I recall, maybe it was a conversation we had about meditation, Freedom very centred as a person where you’re always this way, we always this deliberate? And how did you get to this point or path in Dexter Hardy 30:59 your career. So I’ve always taken the time to either reflect, or pray or meditate. Throughout life, I think one of the things another benefit of COVID, the world was still, so you had time to rest in your thoughts, you had time to reflect on what’s important to you to revisit what your core values our proposition is, and then don’t let your resume be your eulogy. Right? I had a lot of you know, a lot of people were no longer with us because of that. So how do you how do you, you know, like I said, that caused me to reflect on all of those things. So definitely, I’m more mindful of, you know, what I invest my time in, around who you allow to be in your space, because that changes, you know, if if you, they always say if you smile at the world, the world smiles back. And so really just focus on being purposeful and intent about being kind being, you know, being nice being that person that no matter what the circumstances, you’re going to do the right thing. And then, you know, again, at the end of the day, I sleep well at night, you know, there’s peace of mind, you know, that you’re adding or trying to make the world a better place. And so that’s what I focus on. Vince Menzione 32:25 Is that your personal mission? What is your personal philosophy or mission? Dexter Hardy 32:30 My personal philosophy of position is just be 1% better every day. 1% better every day, everyone, you know, you can go out whether it’s workout, whether it’s, you know, meditation, whether it’s, you know, whatever the thing is, instead of trying to go and create these really outlandish goals, just say, I can, I’m gonna do 1% better today, it’s the compounding effect that will add and propel you past everyone Vince Menzione 32:59 else. So my son myself tomorrow was 1% Better than myself today. Correct. I love that. I love that. And then getting 365 days later, we’re, we’re that’s how you get to a trajectory we talked about? Absolutely. And what about for INTEGRO? Right, where are we going? What’s the path for integrity? We talked about, we talked about these new services, but what is your ultimate outcome for the organisation? Dexter Hardy 33:23 So the ultimate outcome for the organisation? You know, I have to think about the end began with the end in mind, right? You know, because we’re scaling at the rate that we’re going, you know, definitely think about acquisition and or, you know, becoming part of another organisation. These the, the other pieces, do we acquire other organisations because, again, we’re, we’re growing at a exponential rate. And, you know, just looking at that value, how do you unlock that value? Obviously, it’s a, an acquisition, or you acquire, or, you know, those are the two things that we’re we’re looking at. Vince Menzione 34:05 So there’s a lot of viewers and listeners to this podcast, ultimate guide to partnering that are looking to get to the path that you’re at right now. What would be the secret sauce, or the one piece of advice you would give them on how to what they need to go do better or Dexter Hardy 34:21 differently? Master the marketplace? So master, Vince Menzione 34:25 so talk about that with us? Take us through Dexter Hardy 34:27 it. So find again, once you have identified it, get a solution in the marketplace. That will give you that recurring revenue model that will give you the ability to do things differently. If you are traditional si and you’re going from south to sow, doing work, that’s great. Until you don’t get that next that’s right engagement. However, if you’re adding value through the market Lace, that becomes a transactional model that as long as they’re using it, you’re making revenue. So now you’re not forced to sell that next deal, you can actually think about, well, how can we add more value here? Nice, you know, for our key customers, you know, again, the concierge cloud, that’s how that came out. It’s like, well, you guys are using this, you know, we have all these other things that you can use, instead of making all these payments, we give you a discount on, you know, getting the entire library. And so that becomes an annual subscription. Right? Vince Menzione 35:35 I love what you have to say here for a lot of organisations that are still trying to figure out the marketplace, master the marketplace. So I have a favourite question. When I asked almost every guest, because it’s just like, I love the way it unpack sometimes. But you’re hosting a dinner party. And you can host this dinner party in anywhere in the world, we could talk about locations as well here. You can invite any three guests from the present, or the past to this amazing dinner party party that you’re going to host I’m sure because you seem like an incredible host. Thanks. Whom would you invite? Dexter Hardy 36:09 And why? So only three? Let’s see, I would do Barack Obama, Barack Obama. I would do Nelson Mandela, nice Nelson Mandela. And I would do my great grandparents. Into the reasons about them. The reason that I say that is, I grew up in the South. And if you go back that time frame, yep. They were on the cusp of slavery, Jim Crow laws, there was a huge talk about a glass ceiling. It was it was more than a glass ceiling. Yeah. And just to let them see what their prayers, what their hard work, what their foresight to kind of plant the seeds to their generation and kids. What that actually created would be, you know, there’s, there’s, that’s why I want them to know that that effort that love that care that they put into their offspring, what was able to be achieved by that? Vince Menzione 37:21 So the two fascinating leaders, obviously, Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years, walks away from it, and ends apartheid in South Africa. And does it peacefully. Right. It was this incredible time. And then Brock Obama first black president, yeah. Any questions for them? Like? What would like how would you spark this conversation up with your great grandparents? Dexter Hardy 37:46 So with my great grandparents, the question, you know, this conversation would be, can you believe this? Like you like literally, it’s like, you see what you did you see what you were able to sharecroppers or whatever they Vince Menzione 38:01 were back in those days, you Dexter Hardy 38:02 see what you were able to create? Yeah. And again, what we’re talking about right now was not even marketplace, selling to globally, none of those things were even on the table. So you know, that’s one for me, that would be a really resounding yes. Vince Menzione 38:19 What do you think they’d say to their great grandson? Dexter Hardy 38:23 Good job, baby. That’s my parents, my grandparents, they always everything was Baby’s like, you know, supporting you always there to kind of be there, backing you. And so the there I could Vince Menzione 38:39 see them saying that that will be your very nurturing individual. I’ve gotten to know you better over the last several months. And I’d say that that trait lives on in your family. Dexter Hardy 38:46 Oh, for sure. Yeah, I haven’t operational. I have three young kings, I call them nice. And so I always tell them, I love them. There’s I say, you know, I serve the right to be upset if you do something, but always know that you’re gonna come you’re it’s a safe, it’s a safe landing space. And I think that builds trust. It helps them build character, because again, you’re going to be in scenarios where you’re upset with someone, it’s part of life. But that’s not the end state. That’s just a moment in time. Right? So a person isn’t just one bad thing or two good things, right. It’s the sum of all your experiences. And so that’s what I like to teach my kids. So Vince Menzione 39:37 this is the ultimate guide to partnering. Yep. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk to you about partnerships. What do you see from the best partnerships and when you see partnerships fail? What you wish you had told those individuals or partners I wish they would say Dexter Hardy 39:54 so. Stay genuine. When you see partnerships fail, it’s usually there was a mal alignment or misalignment in what the outcome was supposed to be. Right? Is, as they say, if you are a partner, it is a mutual scenario, if at some point it becomes a non mutual scenario, so I’m I win, you lose, right? If it becomes adversarial, that’s where you start seeing a lot of the decay. And really, it really kills community. So what I would say to most people is stay genuine, stay true to your initial mission. Don’t let money be the reason for what you’re doing. Have a passion around it. And I would be one of the examples like, do what you love, the money will come. Right. And so you know, I would say stay focus on that. Because again, that value that relationship, knowing that somebody else has your back. You can’t you can’t put $1 amount on that. You seem to love what you do. Absolutely love. Yeah, it comes across really loud and clear. Vince Menzione 41:15 So we have these many Microsoft viewers and listeners with us in the room, what message do you want to share with them on how they can optimise their success this year? Dexter Hardy 41:29 Yeah, so there are several programmes. If you are a Microsoft partner, I would focus on the ISV success programme. The BP gi programme is a great organisation. And again, it’s got to go back to it’s going to sound like a broken record, get involved in the community. Those are communities Yes, join the Microsoft Partner programme if your Microsoft Partner come Vince Menzione 41:54 to ultimate partner experience, Dexter Hardy 41:56 to the ultimate partner experience. Because again, I love what you guys are doing here in with the ultimate partner, it’s not just we have a whole bunch of content, we’re just gonna throw it to you know, you’re being very curious curated information. It’s the secret sauce to like how to navigate quickly through, you know, a big organisation. And so when you’re starting out, or you’re just trying to figure figure what path through, it could be, you know, like drinking from a firehose, I mean, you’re just overwhelmed with all the information. But your organisation definitely does a good job of like, here are the salient points for where you are right now. And this is what you need to Vince Menzione 42:39 do. And I didn’t ask you to say that or pay you to say that, so I appreciate that. Thank you. Dexter Hardy 42:44 Oh, no, that’s like I said, it’s being genuine. I mean, it’s, that’s what you do. Vince Menzione 42:49 It’s been so much fun having you here today. I appreciate you making the trip down here to Boca from Atlanta. And we need to do this again. Hopefully, you’ll be back in the room with us again soon. Awesome. We have an upcoming event in May, little plug there for our partners watching listening. May 30. We’re going to do something here. You’re going to be here in the room with some experts from Microsoft, some other leaders in the industry. So I’m excited to have you back here in Boca not too long a period of time. So some of you awesome really looking forward to so excited to have you today. Thank you so much for being an incredible are an ultimate guest on ultimate partner. Dexter Hardy 43:26 I’m trying to become the ultimate party. Vince Menzione 43:29 I think you’re already there. I think you are what do you think bugs, the ultimate partner. All right. Thank you, sir. Dexter Hardy 43:35 Thanks so much. Vince Menzione 43:36 Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

Apr 1, 2024 • 0sec

215 – Co-Sell Secrets Exposed: How Google Drives Growth with Partners

Chelsea Berlucchi Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Effective co-selling, its where the rubber meets the road on the path to successful partnering. In this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we delve into the intricate world of co-selling strategies alongside Chelsea Berlucchi, Head of Google Subregional Co-Sell, North America, a trailblazing leader spearheading revenue acceleration and partner expansion throughout North America. In this episode, you will embark on a journey as Chelsea drives priceless insights into harmonizing company growth initiatives with customer objectives, ensuring flawless integration and delivery. You will gain unparalleled expertise from Chelsea Berlucchi as she imparts actionable tips and recounts real-world experiences aimed at optimizing co-selling opportunities. Don’t miss out on this chance to enhance your partner collaborations working with Google Cloud and maintain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving tech landscape. What You’ll Learn Co-selling strategies and its importance in the partner ecosystem. (0:02) Career journey and partnerships in the tech industry. (9:08) Career progression and technology sales experience. (13:36) Partner ecosystem growth and collaboration. (16:51) Building an effective co-selling strategy with Google Cloud. (24:54) Partnerships, marketplaces, and personalized sales approaches. (29:33) Co-selling strategies with a Google Cloud partner. (37:33) Google Cloud Next conference, partner strategy, and dinner party invitations. (42:04) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube Announcing Ultimate Partner Experience Ever wonder what you could achieve with the right partners by your side? Dive into the Ultimate Partner Experience Community (UPX) and discover a world brimming with possibilities! Don’t miss out on 50% off for your first year using code EARLYBIRD at checkout. Exclusive Content Gain access to cutting-edge content and events crafted by partnership professionals. Stay ahead with strategies, trends, and in-depth interviews with the industry leaders in partnerships. Access to a Like-Minded Community Our next event is just around the corner and everyone is welcome. Although the event is open to the public, we want to give a special privilege to our members. Which means the Q&A session is exclusive to members only. It’s bound to be an exciting event and we look forward to seeing you all there! Make Connections That Matter! Dive right in and send a direct message to any member of UPX community! You are not just joining a group, but unlocking an open and vibrant network of professionals waiting to connect with you. Seize this golden opportunity to expand your horizons, fuel your career growth and discover exhilarating business prospects. The world is your oyster at UPX, let’s explore it together! Come Join Us I’m thrilled to welcome you to this journey. Let’s navigate, thrive, and redefine success in the tech partnership landscape together. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos Summary Keywords partner, google cloud, customer, organisation, marketplace, cosell, partner ecosystem, team, year, working, cisco, google, led, talk, solution, called, isv, product, build, chelsea Vince Menzione 0:02 Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And on finding this buyer intent you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant every day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Chelsea burr Lucci leads the CO selling function for Google Cloud North America region. And I’m so excited to have her join us as she describes the role of CO selling the importance of the CO selling function, and how organisations like yours can more effectively co sell with Google Cloud. Chelsea, welcome to the podcast. absolutely happy to be here. So we’ve been talking a little bit about your role and how it’s evolved. And I was hoping you could spend some time with our listeners, you’re in a space that I just truly love and work with these partners on, which is on CO selling, and I was hoping you could deep dive for our listeners and viewers about your role and the mission of your organisation at Google. Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, my team does cosell. So right now I’m leading a team. But we call that I’m the head of the our sub regional cosell team for North America. And you and I did get to meet last year, we get to meet at the ISP forum in New York. So hopefully, we get to see you again this summer. Last year, I was really working closely with our ISVs. And I still work very closely with them. A lot of folks in in the ISP organisation do what’s called an ISV specialists role, or they’re what we would name also a partner development manager where they cover a specific ISV. In terms of my team, and my role we do it’s called co sell. So we’re really this team that’s at the front edge. We are working with customers, we’re working with sellers to set a strategy around adopting the partner ecosystem to drive forward. Now I did that last year was hired into that role in April 2022, we had this small but mighty team, which was fabulous. And we really aligned to each of our sub regions in our industries to say, hey, look, we have this opportunity to grow your business and grow your customers business by using our independent software vendors or ISPs and their third party products that run in Google Cloud. Now, this this year, at the beginning of the year, I was asked to take on more of an Extended Scope in my role, which has been very interesting and challenging. All the things at this point. Yeah. And that means that beyond ISC, my team also covers services now. So I’ve taken on a new team of individuals that had been at Google, but really, instead of covering just ice, we are covering that entire partner ecosystem. So again, when a customer comes to us, or when we’re working with our sales organisation, we can say, Hey, what is your strategy to execute this year? And what is that strategy inclusive of the partner ecosystem, we get really good to be the advocates for for our partners and coach our sellers on how to grow sell with with partners along the way. So that’s really the evolution of my role. Since you you saw me last. So things have certainly changed. I would say we’re doing some of the similar motions, just driving more rigour around that whole crew self process here. It’s part of our mission in general. So the partner ecosystem has is really standardise on what that looks like. And as you can imagine, you know, it’s really to work with our partner ecosystem, to make sure our customers are adopting Google Cloud technologies. And although that can be interpreted up and down and how you go after that mission in a couple of different ways, it really helps all different parts and pieces of our partner ecosystem within North America and Google Cloud to drive towards that one thing is really supporting our customers the right way, as they’re trying to adopt more Google Cloud as they’re trying to join a straight with us. Yeah, such an important function. In fact, and I wanted to spotlight on this because a lot of organisations at the hyperscale level, there’s this division of labour, right? So if I’m an ISV, I might have a partner development person or whether whatever the role is called, and they’re really focused in on the business development of that organisation, technological development, maybe the overall arching business strategy. But often what’s missed is this effective co selling piece and I was hoping you just described it, actually. But people don’t always understand what co selling means. Right? So I was hoping we can kind of double click on what is effective co selling and what isn’t it from your perspective? Now this is a great question because I think Chelsea Berlucchi 5:00 selling ads is a new word to your term, right? We’re hearing it a lot in technology companies, we’re hearing a lot in sales organisations. And we’re starting to see more and more individuals adopt this as even in title and what their their jobs are really entailed to. And so it being that more modern term and its baseline, the simple answer here is CO selling is really when two or more organisations come together to sell a complementary solution to a customer that they’ve identify. And we see this where, for an example, again, we’ve talked about ISVs, which is part of the organisation that I support. And that’s our independent software vendors. These are organisations that have said, Hey, we want to go to market with Google Cloud, so much so that we’re going to invest in their technology, we’re going to run applications in Google Cloud. And we’re going to list our product in the Google Cloud Marketplace. And now on the other side of that Google Cloud has also made this neutral investment by way of adding resources and tools and things that these companies can leverage people really to support that motion, and a cosell team. And so we’re invested in saying, hey, look, ISV thinks we’re going to market with us. And here’s how we’re going to jointly do that. Let’s take a look at the customer with that customer needs, and what solution we can provide to them. It when it comes to things like ISV and CO selling, we’re talking a lot about solution and completeness or out of box solutions that you may have, again, that are running on Google Cloud. On the other side of that, as I said, you know, my team also covers services partners. And that can be our systems integrators that have these fabulous solutions or services that are driving Google Cloud, maybe we have customers that are looking to adopt our technologies and set up a landing zone, they haven’t really started with Google Cloud, or they’ve identified a larger workload I did, it’s in a migration. And they want to provide those services too. So along those ways, it’s working together with these organisations and figuring out how we can provide that end solution or end service to the customer. By co selling together. That’s a you know, again, the highlight of of what co selling is and how we interpret it here at Google Cloud and how we actually go to market with a motion like that. What it isn’t, is, you know, what we’re probably more familiar with, if you’ve grown up in technology, or any sort of organisation where maybe you’re an OEM, or even a hyper scalar, or an independent software vendor, and you typically have what’s called a reseller. And this would be an organisation that is decided to say, hey, we want to take your product or your service, and we want to resell it to an end customer, a lot of times, that’s a, you know, a mutually agreed upon commercial contract, they get a certain amount of money for each of the sales, and then they can go directly to the customer and resell your product with CO selling, it really comes to that baseline word that we love here. And that’s partnership, right, we get to both be invested in the process, and support each other through it. And really, the customer comes out on top here, which is great, because we really stopped to pause to learn and understand what a customer needs through this journey to Vince Menzione 8:16 Yeah, I think what you had to say here is really relevant to the conversation we’ve been having about how it used to be a push right to the customer. Now the customer is dictating the route, right? They’re saying, I want to buy from Google, I want to buy, I might want to stitch together two solutions, I might want to take an SI solution and an ISV solution. And I want to I want to burn down against my agreement with Google to do so. And their help. And you’re working with them to effectively coordinate between the multiple parties, multiple partners involved? Absolutely, we are. And I think you know, we’ve talked about this in the past, but we see an organisation really evolve what they want to offer to a customer and they take a step back, and they say, Okay, I have this great partnership with Google Cloud, which is, you know, formidable. hyperscale are in the industry right now. And that’s, that’s great. But oftentimes, you need to think more about that. Because as you have these conversations with a customer, they’re going to want more than one thing. They’re looking at big picture. And that means more products, more solutions, more services. So we even say to our partners, whether it be a service partner, a sell partner, or build partner, what we call our ISVs is take a look at also our Google Cloud ecosystem, where can you make further relationships and partnerships, to then advance your opportunities in what you’re providing to a customer to? So we don’t we’re certainly at that, at the centre of that in that partnership. But we also have again, this fast partner ecosystem of 1000s of partners where everyone can start to work together to piece together what a customer is really looking for. Chelsea Berlucchi 9:53 Yeah, I think this area is so misunderstood by many organisations right where they they miss they missed the whole point. hero’s journey in the process, how you’re getting there. And I think you’re covering that specifically and maximising your relationship working with Google, and then working within their own ecosystem to maximise the results they’re trying to solve for. I’d like to double click on you, though, on your career journey, right? Because, you know, this is you’ve had an amazing career journey, Google, an amazing career journey in general. And I was hoping maybe you can spend a moment with our listeners and viewers here on how you got to this spot in your career. Chelsea? Yeah, of course. So a little history on Chelsea. I. So I’ve been at Google now for six years, but I’ll back it up. So prior to Google, I was at Cisco for 10 years. And that’s where I started my career. I started right out of college, I actually got my offer letter in my email on my drive home from Thanksgiving break for Thanksgiving break senior year in college, which is pretty exciting. So it makes for a really great rest of the senior year, of course, to be able to sign on the dotted line and know that, you know, you’re pretty much taken care of once you graduate at that point. But so I started just a couple of months again, after I graduated from college at Cisco, in what was called their Cisco sales associates programme. And you’ve probably heard of it a lot of other organisations have these programmes where they take in new grads from college or maybe graduate school. And they teach them the ins and outs of the organisation that technology soft skills that they need to be launched into the field as a seller. So I did that in North Carolina for nine months. And then I moved straight out to Boston, I packed my car with most of my belongings, some still, I probably left at my parents house at that point, and got a place in Boston and town that I actually never been to and took an outside sales role with Cisco, in that, I would say provided so much of foundation of one my career for for my entire journey, but also this role that I’m in today, I really gained my sales chops, I would say bear and a lot of bumps and bruises. But also, because I’m a very competitive person, it was something that I was excited to do. So I was at Cisco for 10 years. And you really learn when not only to you know how to truly qualify a customer how to work with customers. But Cisco does, you know, you can check me on this 95 plus percent of their business through a value added reseller to partners. And so they also have this really strong partner ecosystem that is really seen as a gold standard in a lot of industries. And one of the first lessons you also learn at Cisco is how do you actually partner, and those that do it successfully are going to learn how to scale their business the right way, but also, again, at the root of all of this is meet with their customer needs. So I built that, as I said, that foundation for 10 years, and it was going to meetings with partners, it’s leaving a meeting, calling a partner, and updating them on the status of the meeting. It’s putting together strategy with partners, and they become some of your best friends. One of them. I’m excited to see at Google Cloud Next soon, he and I have started our careers really together and kind of grown up in the business. So it’s been interesting to see a lot of the things that he’s done. He’s still at a partner, which you know, I value a lot. And I remember one one time, we’re going out to meetings in Vermont, we are carpooling together, and we planned how he was going to propose to his wife. So you really get closer to your partners if you’re doing it the right way. Yeah, they have, you know, beautiful family now. And it’s been incredibly successful. But it that built that foundation. And then after 10 years at Gu at Cisco Sorry, I was really thinking, this is the point in which I need to look at, hey, do I want to stay at Cisco? Or do I want to explore other opportunities, and at that point, it was everything you heard about was cloud cloud, cloud cloud. And I thought, Okay, I have this backdrop of really, technology sales, and even what’s in the data centre. But let’s see what this evolutionist is about, right. And so I got a role at Google. That was also indirect sales. I wanted to go into people leadership, but I’m also a firm believer of working for someone that has done your job before is a lot better of experience than someone that hasn’t. And whether that means you’re a manager and you have maybe an open wreck on your team and you are backfilling yourself. So you learn what it’s like to sit in your team shoes, or, you know, if you’re actually going for a position you’ve, you’ve at least done it for a little while. So I learned the Google way of selling what the technology was like what the customers were really worried about how to make them comfortable and confident with what we had. But then also my first week on the job was meeting what we then called our partner sales managers, which is A team that I lead now. And the PSM at the time, was incredibly helpful. He had the same kind of background that I did were knows how to partner and why partners are there to scale your business, but also make you and the customer successful. So it was great to build out a different strategy. As I progressed at, at Google, I really got in deeper with our ISP organisation. And I started to do a lot more business with our ISPs, this was actually a new function. For me to learn. We didn’t we didn’t do this at Cisco. So knowing that another organisation was running on top of Google Cloud, and by the way it could sell it and we incentivize our sellers to do so was pretty cool. So I got close with several of our partners, and I got to learn a lot more about my customers business, because I wasn’t just talking to them about what Google Cloud could provide. I was asking them broader questions. And instead of thinking, Oh, I can’t do that at Google. I was I was starting to think, let me see who of our partners can can do is to provide it. So it got me in a lot more conversations. And it made me understand that this really made you one of these invaluable assets to your customer to so I became more passionate about it. And luckily for me, they decided to invest in the IOC organisation that grew it. And I received the role that I got in April 2022, leading the cosell team fries team. So that’s really that’s my journey of, you know, being both at at Cisco and Google. I’m what I would think as an elder millennial, so I should probably have more hops in my career at this point. But I don’t because I’ve really been happy with the organization’s I’ve been with, and I hope I get to stay at Google longer to Vince Menzione 16:51 see, if you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I build growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change, and part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders ISV, sellers, S size MSPs, and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is, it’s noisy, I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There is a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard, we’re getting ready to open the doors early in a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder, and innovator or leader, visit our website. As well, what I hear loud and clear is you’ve gone deep, right? You worked in an organisation it was very partner centric, a little bit more channel centric, that’s called the old school way of doing things. And then co selling Google like you were doing your field salary. So you got you got street cred, in my opinion. And then you’ve now you’ve integrated into this partner organisation, which by the way, we’ve had Jim Anderson, as you know, we’ve had his leadership team talking about precision partnering, where exactly does your function sit in that partner organisation? And what does it look like today? Chelsea Berlucchi 18:32 That’s a great question. So this is something that, you know, moving the mystery around, how do I work with Google? Where do people sit is something that we get asked a lot to? It’s a one, it’s a great question, and, and people need to understand what that looks like. We actually had a pretty cool event at the beginning of the year called partner kickstart, where we invited our partners to several different locations around North America. And they got to sit with our sales teams, and then learn about the initiatives for this fiscal year, which was, which was great to get everyone on the same page, but also just build momentum for the year and get started on the right foot. And through the sessions each of us shared with this partner ecosystem looks like and so typically, when I have this question, I share a slide. So if people see me you can always ask me for it, but I’ll try to paint a picture here for you. Imagine please do Yeah. So imagine two pieces of the organisation that Jim Ron’s which is the North America partner ecosystem. On one side, we have this partner segment focused and you’ve had plenty of these leaders on we have our cell and service portion which is led by Shelby Johnston. We have our solution Si, which is led by Rebecca Potts, our GSI team that’s led by Gina Frederick Angelina who’s new you should have on and then of course, our ISV team, which is led by Scott Barson. Now within each of their teams they have we’ve you know that term we’ve said before as the partner development managers are eyes The specialists. And these are folks that are specifically chartered with covering in one to few partners to make sure that they’re building out a go to market strategy that can be launched at the north north american level. And they’re really looking to execute alongside these partners too, which is great. So intense precision partnering, as you said, with these particular partners to make sure we’re being very intentional in our go to market motions. Now, that’s one side that’s partner segment. On the other side, we have our customer segment focus, and this is where I sit. So this is where we have the enterprise cosell team, which is my team. We have our strategic accounts and industries cosell team, which is led by James Hardy, who is new to Jim’s team to James and I really work closely because our teams do the same thing, just covering different sets of accounts. And so we get to collaborate and share a lot of notes, which is great. Now, we have another new portion to the customer segment focus, and that is mid market enterprise. This is led by Lainey marks, who is you know, just absolutely tough. She is competitive. And she’s going after this business of mid market enterprise. And this is new, because we have taken a set of customers that sit what we call this mid market enterprise. And we have decided we want to be completely partner facing with them, which is great. So she has a team of sellers that are their go to market is always with and through a partner, which is great. And then finally Vince Menzione 21:31 makes a lot of sense, by the way, because the mid market has been underserved in general from a partner perspective, right? Yes, Chelsea Berlucchi 21:37 yeah, agreed. And it and there’s so much opportunity there, I think. And we see a lot of these, these customers too, that have either it’s a niche product, or the solution they’re offering, or the way they’re built, the organisation should be reliant on working with a partner or building out their own ecosystem, too. So I’m glad that she’s chartered that this year, she’s doing a phenomenal job. The last piece of our customer focused teams is the candidate ecosystem, which is led by Meghan Tanner, whom again, is there another force that you should have on the call to so all of these folks are working together, either we’re out there with the customers and the sellers making sure we know how to co sell, we are working directly with customers, we’re building up these partners and what the business they’re doing with Google Cloud, but also the business that they’re representing out there in the field. And our underlying teams here, of course, partner engineering. And then we also have a Gen AI Centre of Excellence where we are keenly focused on driving innovation through generative AI and cloud AI. Vince Menzione 22:38 Okay, so that’s a pretty massive organisation. It’s a long as a lot of ground to cover. I’m a partner, I’m trying to figure out, like, where do I start? Like, who do I work with? Can you help us there? Chelsea Berlucchi 22:48 Yeah, absolutely. And that’s it? That’s a great question, I will make this very simple. If you are a partner in meaning you have gone to our partner advantage portal, you’ve registered, you’ve gotten the right certifications, pass the test, urine, you know, you should always still be working first with your account team. And that sounds a little weird, but I will say is that this could be your initial go to, and really, that Launchpad into further into the partner ecosystem, you would have an accounting that has this investment, initial interest in how successful you are in the Google Cloud ecosystem. And they can also talk to their peers to make sure you’re getting the right love to start with. Beyond that, as we see partners really develop what they have and their relationship with Google Cloud, we do ask that they then digging deeper to this partner advantage portal, which is going to provide them with a lot of training and access to information on how to build out a good market, but also gives them a platform to then log opportunity share that information. So we can see, oh, this is a very relevant partner that making an impact. Let’s support them more in that sense, too. So I would say start with those two. But then, as you as you progress within the Google Cloud ecosystem, we have folks like partner advisors that help you and partner and development managers or ISP specialists. And then of course, you know, that large team that I shared with you as well, that it’s standing there with with North America. And by the way, that’s just one part of our ecosystem. We have a global team too. Vince Menzione 24:20 So I know you present to partners quite a bit on these topics and how to help them be more successful. And I got a peek at some of your presentation materials before we have this conversation. Can you talk about this? And I believe very much in how you show up. Right? How do you stand out? How do you differentiate yourself as a partner, right, because now I’m a partner and there’s all these other partners that are trying to you know, they’re tugging on the teams to cosell together. And I like to talk about being a shiny quarter and a bucket full of shiny terms I use, like, how do you show up differently uniquely? How do I build an effective co selling strategy that will resonate with your sellers? and your customers, Chelsea? Chelsea Berlucchi 25:01 Yeah. So another great question that we do get frequently, we see people that come into the ecosystem they want to launch, they want to launch the right way. And so I do think it’s good to level set, right? It’s good to understand what you’re offering, how do we position it with the field so that you do get the right amount of scale resources, as well as intention that you may need to be successful with us too. So I think you hit on one key point that I’m just going to underscore right now is around a differentiated value proposition. And so in some cases, if we’re talking about an ISV, or an independent software vendor, offering up that technical, technically differentiated solution is a, you know, key importance. And I think any company out there that has built a product, they probably did it because they saw a gap in the market, or a new market that they wanted to build out. So that can be a little bit easier for these partners. One thing we also like to say is take that solution and how you’re differentiated, but then tie it back to Google Cloud, too. So how does it actually work well, with Google Cloud first party, and that will one help our sellers understand, Oh, these two work together, this is why they make sense. This is why it makes sense to our customers, and really helps them resonate with that actual solution. Now, on the other side of that, if your services or sell partner, maybe a little little more difficult, so you do want to then have a bit of a story. And I would actually tell everyone this and in that if you have that 30 minutes with the seller, we’re really pushing our customers to say yes, you may have your five minute pitch, which is great, I love a five minute pitch, you’ve boiled down to a shark tank type of thing. And we know really what we’re gonna get out of that conversation. But what I’m shifting folks to do this year is to share a win story, because I do think those can win a win story, tell me how you worked with a customer to win an opportunity and win over that customer to hopefully be a referenceable customer for you, because that’s really gold standard, right? Not only do they enjoy the process of working with you, they enjoyed it so much that they’re willing to be a reference for other customers, and even maybe talk to your sales team or other sellers to to understand why. And so I’m pushing goats to do that five minute pitch, but also a five minute win story of how and why a customer would adopt your solution, your service, your technology, I do think that those things will go a long way. And we do internal win stories, or we call win wires as well really sharing, hey, we’ve just started to work with this customer. They decided to move forward with Google Cloud and this technology or this partner. And here’s really what that cosell process looked like. So I would say get you know, get organised with those kind of the the basics and the foundation there. But beyond that, there’s always loads of content that people want to share with us. It’s, you know, could be an extensive pitch deck. It could be a list of qualifying questions, it could be architectures to review. It could be a Rolodex of people at the organisation to cosell with ourselves and all that’s fine. But I also do say, Hey, what is what is it good kind of walk away to pager. So you’re gonna have your, your, you know, five minute pitch, you may have your wind story, and then give us that battle card of information to get us to launch within the field teams. I think all those things, you know, we’ll get started. And then of course, you evolve from there. But you know, it can look look different for everyone as well. I just got a note from a manager yesterday morning saying hey, I just want to give props to an ISV that showed up so well with my team. And what his eyes we did was they they reached out to the manager, they asked for an account list, they went back and did their homework, they did account mapping, they said here’s where we are, here’s where we’re working with these customers, here’s maybe where we need help. And then they recorded themselves giving a 10 minute or less overview of how they were going to address this particular managers team. And really a little bit about their solution to in that sort of preparation and for thought that took probably you know 30 minutes to an hour on the partner side. Set them up for success with this manager and then their team and so that one interaction would lead to really a door opening at a probably 100 customers which is pretty cool. So I think Little things like that go a long way. Vince Menzione 29:33 I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago. Athletic Greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all Have my nutritional basis supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase, go to drink 80 one.com forward slash Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. I think what you said to like getting, you know, you called about the five the elevator pitch the brand story, and then the customer account story, right? Like, what what did you do differently better in that account, I think, taking a seller through that process, so they could personalise it and say, Okay, this is how this partner can work with me more effectively. And then getting to the what’s in it for me, resonating with like, this is how you can win, we can win together by again, exposing the account list saying, Hey, these are the accounts will rehab relevance. This is the whitespace opportunities we can go after together and coming to the table prepared like that. Just it’s so important. I think doing that is the best way to differentiate yourself in the market, would you say? I Chelsea Berlucchi 31:13 absolutely think Sony can get it goes back to basics, which I think people forget about a lot. And I will say from my jump from Cisco to Google, I had to go back to basics, right? It was coming from a company that was number one in a lot of markets to a company that was not. And you as I said, you get I got more bumps and bruises along the way, but really taught me to go back and say, you’ve got to prove yourself. And that means you start at layer one there. And really going back to basics will help. And I think doing that little bit of work again, goes a long way for sure. Vince Menzione 31:50 So let’s talk about marketplaces. I mean, we could probably spend the entire conversation here on marketplaces. It’s I’ve been calling this the marketplace moment. I mean, it’s it’s astounding to see the uptake just in a very short period of time over the last couple of years now. The durable cloud budgets, right customers are making buying decisions at the executive level with Google. They’re making large commitments. And this opportunity to show up differently and transact differently. We talked about millennial generation, Gen Z, also not wanting, like doing things digitally, our lives have changed since COVID. Right? How do in marketplaces are being a bigger thing that GCP? Right, I think that this is becoming a better vehicle, a way to bring multiple partners together? How do I initiate a conversation about GCP marketplace with a customer? Yeah, Chelsea Berlucchi 32:42 so I think this is another one that that we do get frequently, right. So we have ISVs, that, again, have built products that run on Google Cloud. And they’re available to purchase in our Google Cloud Marketplace, which is in our billing console. It’s in our Google Cloud Console, which is really where our customers go to build out projects with Google Cloud products. But it’s very easy for them to then click over to the marketplace and say, hey, look, I need solution completeness, or I want something that’s out of the box. And I’ve got a tonne of solutions to pull from there. And we do have an extensive marketplace. It’s been building and growing. And you did have Scott Arneson on last year, who’s who’s my boss. And he’s now you know, over his year at Google send an incredible job with really applying a lot of rigour in organisation to how we go to market, how we show up with our partners, but also with our customers. And in that he has an individual that’s also on his team named Pete Henderson, who is if you’re talking about marketplace, you got to get him on P is our marketplace go to market lead. So what Pete does is really straddles that line between go into market where he’s meeting with customers on a daily basis around the marketplace. And sometimes these are very strategic, sometimes they’re difficult conversations. And he takes back any feedback around features and functionality and make sure it gets to our marketplace global team to say, hey, can we start to make enhancements here. And, you know, I love working with Pete. He’s really one of my partners in crime here. And one thing we talk about often is this conversation of how to initiate the talk with with your customer around Google Cloud Marketplace, or marketplace in general. And we really tried to break it out in a couple of different ways. You’re going to have a first time user of the marketplace. And in that case, I always coach our sellers to say, if you’re having one a first time call or reset call with your customer, or just a general weekly update, you know, open up the Google Cloud Console, give them a quick tour and bring them over to the marketplace and share the show with them. Hey, where it is why our teams, our customers use it right and why it’s beneficial to them, and have them ask them questions, but then bring in bring in the Google Cloud team or your are, you know the Google app marketplace team to again help you have those conversations as well. Also the cosell team there. But that’s one is getting getting a feel for where they are. Had they used a marketplace in the past. If it wasn’t Google Cloud, great, that tells me they’re open to the process that tells him that procurement understands how to work with they understand it, yes, they understand it. So I don’t mind that I actually, I really like it because then we’re not really trying to convince them to use the marketplace, we’re just, you know, really giving the information on hey, we have a marketplace, here’s why you should be using it. If you’re also working with Google Cloud. Or even if you’re not, if you have partners that are listed in the marketplace, here’s why it’s also valuable to you and to them. And then that’s one place, it’s a very simple, straightforward conversation on the other side of that, if you have a customer that has used the marketplace before, but maybe they haven’t done what’s called a private offer, where they’re negotiating directly with an ISV. And that offer then comes through the marketplace for them to click to accept. And it’s maybe a more bespoke offer really tailored to their needs. They’ve done something maybe more like a click to subscribe, which is also totally okay. Or maybe they’ve done a trial they tested around, but nothing really substantial yet, with Google Cloud Marketplace, and you want to get them more comfortable and confident. This is maybe a little more of a sit down. It’s one, hey, we’ve noticed you’ve been using the Google Cloud Marketplace. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you’ve been testing? How’s that going? Do you know? How do you like the billing integration? And what else could you be using it for? And then the larger conversation is maybe with procurement to to help them understand, hey, look, here’s why it’s valuable to our procurement teams. Here’s why it’s helpful for you on the financial side of things, if you have a Google Cloud commit to in show remove, as we said, that mystery of the what and the why of the marketplace to get them comfortable. And then I always say handhold handhold through that first purchase. So if you’re a partner, having this conversation around that Google Cloud Marketplace, bring the cosell team in, bring that your sales counterpart at Google Cloud, to have the conversation to and be there and be ready when the customer does make that first purchase, we want to make sure it goes smoothly, and that they come back and then they reroute all purchases through the marketplace. So that’s what I mean by hand holding them and making sure they have a really, really good experience the first first time or second time or third time or 20th time. Vince Menzione 37:33 Do you ever have partners asked for propensity data? So do they ever come to you and say, who are customers who are either underspend on their cloud commitments, or might have a higher propensity to buy through marketplace? Chelsea Berlucchi 37:46 You know, we do pretty confidential. Obviously, we can’t, we can’t share out, you know, hey, look, here’s a list of our committed customers, these are customers that have really trusted us and put together a financial agreement. But what we like to do is it’s really give them the tools and resources to say, hey, look, you know, we do have some, some mutual conversations going on, or customers that are, you know, we’re also working on projects together, can you tell us how you may be working with them to so this, this goes back to that CO selling one on one of the give and take, right? If you’re gonna come and say, Hey, can you tell us where all of your businesses we’re gonna, you know, probably not do that. But we’d like to understand, hey, look, what kind of conversations are you also having, and I love that I love when two sellers get together, right, and they start talking about a mutual customer. And that way, they can really, one, become more confident working with each other. And as you probably know, if you’ve been in sales in the past, when you have someone that’s also in the trenches, maybe another company, then you build trust. And then you also really, the conversation evolved so much better to so we definitely, you know, have a give and take and make sure that we’re both doing neutral sharing, but again, of course, within within the realm of what we’re allowed to do there. Yeah, Vince Menzione 39:05 no, I understood. So let’s take us through. So we built our brand story. We’ve talked about when wires or successes that we’ve had together, help help illustrate the solution. We’ve gotten some success together working with the teams, we might have introduced marketplaces, we’ve gotten that flywheel going, now that we’ve gotten our flywheel going for a period of time, what else can we do to drive more effective co selling as a more mature partner now working with you and your organisation? Yeah, so Chelsea Berlucchi 39:34 I love this question. When I get this from partners, because it really tells me they’re looking to continue to invest and grow their relationship with Google Cloud, right? And they’re looking for coaching. They’re looking for feedback, whatever it may be. So we always get to one go to an idea board to and say, Hey, let’s figure out where you are and where do you want to be get to be a little creative, but I give folks a bit of a roadmap In where I see, you know, hey, here’s some of our really what we may call gold standard, or these partners that are have been really successful. And we also look at those that maybe are just starting out. And so what we first see is okay, the customers or partners decided to invest in Google Cloud, they’re building out a go to market with us and become a partner. Ideally, we’d like that partner to then assign someone the Google Cloud relationship, meaning do you as a partner have someone that owns who will cloud in terms of alliances in terms of a channel there, and that means they’re, they’re dedicated enough, they’re invested enough to know it’s a core part of their business to even hire someone or a team of someone’s to manage that relationship? And so we say that’s, that’s first checkmark, okay, Alliance is great, because we also have that too. The second one is okay, we see alliances and may start to immediately engage with maybe their counterpart at Google Cloud or sales directly. And I think those engagements are good, but they can only go so far, as you know, we just talked about this, where we really see things start to develop and grow, is when an organisation can get their sales team to talk to our sales team as well. And that means maybe they didn’t aligned on incentives, they’ve really said, Hey, sellers, at our partner, this is how you know, we’re going to pay you if you’re, you know, you work and you sell Google Cloud or with our through the the marketplace, right, or whatever else it may be, but if they have some sort of interest in working with Google Cloud sellers, and we get both of those grip groups working together, that creates a lot of this, this good gossip, a lot of champions internally, and we see more scale there, those two can be pretty easy to check off. And the third one we really anchor on is, again, another point we’ve talked about is expanding a partnership within Google clouds partner ecosystem. So say, if you’re an ISV, I find that a lot of them have said, Okay, we’re just going to work with the hyper scalar, right, and we’re going to launch in the marketplace. And that’s it. But they haven’t really adopted a resale strategy. They haven’t adopted a services strategy. And so at some point along the sales cycle, they may be a little stuck, maybe that’s in the prospecting stage, maybe it’s in the final stage of implementation, but there’s maybe a backlog or an area where they could really adopt business faster. And that means, hey, look, you’re already part of this ecosystem, why not lean in further, and find more partners that can really help you along the way? Again, maybe it’s implementing services, or reselling. And this can go into different ways, right? You’re a sell partner of ours, and your customer keeps asking for a particular solution that you don’t have in your book of business. Maybe Google Cloud does, or our marketplace does, go strike up these relationships with those partners too. And then you know, that third one is really services partners, which can say, hey, they may want to offer a solution completeness, or they know I’m going to implement x, and then my customer is automatically going to go search for y product, and to really add on or see, Hey, how is this other product actually running or working. And so you can really think about your business like that from the customer’s perspective is always really helpful, and then build out what that cosell strategy looks like. So I say, these are three buckets that are pretty distinct, and get a little more strategic as you go along. And then underlying that is really just this innovation, right? We talked about Jim AI, but that can be inclusive of other products. And that is taking that customer feedback to say, what are they really challenging you to do to maybe add to your product? Or what is the market really saying in terms of, hey, we like what you have to offer. But this is where things are headed. And using Google Cloud in the force of our engineering to really help you evolve your products and maybe even revolutionise them at some point to can can help you further along in that cosell process. Yeah, Vince Menzione 44:06 I love it. I love it. And Google Next is next week, like, I’m excited to be coming out to Vegas. Although I’m not always excited to come to Vegas. I am excited to come to Google next next week. I know you’ll be there. What’s in store for those listening and viewing today? Like what can they expect? And where should they go? What are the best sessions that they should attend? Chelsea Berlucchi 44:26 Yeah, that’s another good one. So I think I’m excited to you know, likewise, not so excited about Vegas. But I think well, you’re I’m excited about is Google Cloud Next. And it feels like we just had it because you did. But that’s part of why I’m excited because we get to take all the momentum that we had last year and we get to have it at the beginning of the year this year. And now even though the time in which we just had it out in San Francisco is much shorter. Now. There have been so many advancements and announcements, certainly around cloud AI in general. of AI that I think people are going to be excited to hear and see more about. So you know, obviously tune in to that keynote, get your seat there to make sure you hear what is the latest and greatest. Also, this is a partner podcast. So we have a specific area Partner Summit area for our partners to come and join us. My favourite thing from last year was the expo hall. So we have our partners that have set up booths. And we’ve these are sponsoring partners, they have assigned seating all around to really demo their products where you can meet with these partners, you can understand their value pitch, and you can really see what’s going on. They have a lot of swag, of course. So if you’ve got, you know, friends or kids at home, and you want to bring them a little souvenir, you can load up on the water bottles and stickers and all the things you really want. Like yeah, yes, yeah. Bring an extra suitcase just for that if you can. No, but yeah, Vince Menzione 45:58 so and also the parties. I know, I heard there’s like 100 partner parties, they’re going to be going Chelsea Berlucchi 46:03 on there too many, I think, yeah, we’ll have to hire a driver for the night to just carry around from from one part party to another. But yeah, so all of that is going on? I think certainly the partner keynote will be interesting. We do partner awards, but we really get to hear from our leaders at Google Cloud that share one the important importance of partnership, and what are we driving together? And of course, you know, that is something that will bring us through the remainder of the year, that sort of momentum and direction is something that we can all really anchor on and build our businesses Vince Menzione 46:37 around. Yeah. So Google Next April 9 10th. And 11th. Yeah, next week, excited to have and to see you in person again, IRL. Likewise, I have one more. Yeah, I have one more question. And it’s a favourite question. I asked all my guests this question. You are hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present? Or the past this amazing dinner party? You could we could even talk about where you’re going to host that dinner party? Whom would you invite Chelsea? And why? Chelsea Berlucchi 47:08 Yes. So I have listened to your podcast in the past, I knew this one was coming to. And so I thought about it a bit. You know, I think what I would like to do so in 2020, tough year for all of us. But unfortunately, I lost both of my grandfather’s within months of each other. So it was tough, obviously, it you know, was a huge, huge gap in our families and, and tough on my parents, of course, and so I would certainly have them there, just to have that, that last meal, because in 2020, you really couldn’t go and visit people right or locked down. And so I think I’m just learning so much, even, you know, after they both passed away about them, and also really the marriages that they had with my grandmother’s too, who are both are bound, thankfully. And so I’m gonna break your rules a little bit. I’m going to give up my seat. And I’m gonna give both of those last two seats to my grandmother so they can have maybe a double date a romantic dinner. I don’t think they’ll be lurking around. But I do think that they would appreciate Vince Menzione 48:11 you joining. You could be she could be the chaperone as well. Okay, I Chelsea Berlucchi 48:16 can I can bring them their meals. I’d probably like that. To them. Yeah, no. So I think I would do that. Yeah, I think you know, it’s funny, I remember seeing you in, in New York. And after we had that big date the forum, we ran into each other, I ran into you and your wife, and you guys were getting to just get out around town and going to see your favourite French bakery and enjoy a bluebird, New York City day. And so I do think, of course, that marriage and partnerships are great, and they both had some some really strong ones. So I’m sure they’d appreciate that one last nail together. Vince Menzione 48:47 Thank you. Thank you. You’ve been an amazing guest. Chelsea, I so enjoyed spending time with you today. I’m so excited to see you next week. And if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, try to get out to Vegas for this event, or I know it’s gonna also be live streamed as well. So listen, watch. Google Cloud is on a tear, exciting time for our partner community. Chelsea, my favourite subject, co selling, having you on board leading this very important function. Excited to see what’s next for you. And for Google Cloud. Thank Chelsea Berlucchi 49:20 you so much, Vince. It’s been great to be here. And I look forward to seeing you next week. And to all the listeners as well. Hopefully I get to see you at Google Cloud Next. Vince Menzione 49:28 All right. Well, looking forward to seeing all of you at Google Cloud Next. Thank you so much for watching, and listening to The Ultimate Guide to bartering. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe add to our new YouTube channel ultimate partner we’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

Mar 25, 2024 • 0sec

214 – Unleashing $Billions in Growth: Chief Partner Officer Secrets with Greg Sarafin

Global Managing Partner—Alliance Ecosystem at EY, Greg Sarafin, shares secrets to driving billions in growth through strategic partnerships and leadership. Topics include tech industry's impact on GDP, AI value creation, effective partner operations, and leadership skills for C-suite roles.

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214 – Unleashing $Billions in Growth: Chief Partner Officer Secrets with Greg Sarafin

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