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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Jan 8, 2024 • 0sec

203 – Unlocking a Trailblazer Tech Journey Sparks Empowerment and Innovation!

Jan 4, 2024 • 24min

202 – Ultimate Partner LIVE: “A Journey of Teamwork, Faith, and Igniting Partnerships”

Listen as Vince Menzione Kicks Off LIVE in Dallas Building an event from scratch in 100 days is not for the faint of heart. I am incredibly grateful to everyone involved in the process. The friends who said “just do it”, the team in Las Colinas, the experts who came on the team, the sponsors who placed blind faith in my ability to fill the room, and the hundreds or perhaps thousands who cheered us on and helped fill the venue. I’m excited to release this keynote from Ultimate Partner LIVE. I wish you all could have been in the room to feel the energy, the excitement, and the spark around partnerships and igniting the ecosystem. It was electric. We will be sharing select sessions such as this one with our listeners and hope you join Ultimate Partner Experience to watch all the sessions and experience more! LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP What You’ll Learn Partnering for business success with industry insights.0:00 Partnering with Microsoft for success.4:48 Partnering with Microsoft and driving growth.9:20 Technology transformation and partnerships.14:28 Embracing marketplace growth and partner-led ecosystems.19:04 Why Ultimate Partner? I am thrilled to welcome you into a world of unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information designed to unlock your full potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals. Our journey began nearly seven years ago with a vision to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, Ultimate Partner is a beacon dedicated to revolutionizing your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering ecosystem-led growth through this experience platform, including digital and live events, advisory services, and much more. In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead. Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?” If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace ecosystem-led growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos UP Live Event – Vince Menzione…t kickoff – Full Length Audio Thu, Jan 04, 2024 12:16PM • 24:23 SUMMARY KEYWORDS partner, microsoft, talk, ecosystem, marketplace, leaders, people, organizations, room, event, candidly, podcast, call, business, sponsors, company, opportunity, pivot, successful, inspire SPEAKERS Vince Menzione, Announcer Announcer 00:00 This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione. Vince Menzione 00:21 Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partner. I’m Vince Menzione, your host, and in November of 2023 30, leaders congregated to a packed house of partners to help spark the ecosystem in this time of rapid change and transformation. If you were there in person, you felt the electricity and excitement in the room. But if you couldn’t join us in person, I still wanted to share this incredible rich content with you here. So I hope you enjoy this amazing session, as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you. I want to thank all of you, from the bottom of my heart for being here. I can’t tell you how important this is. And what an amazing moment this is. As we each find our purpose and our mission, I just want to welcome you this event is live the Americas version and sparking the ecosystem for a reason. Because my passion and mission is around this remelt did a great job on the tee up. But I’ve described my career as for successful business transformations. See, I didn’t start at Microsoft. I did a startup in the early days of wireless computing. We took the company from 6 million to 120. We went public on the Toronto exchange. I then did a turnaround the Golden Gate capital had spun out of a chapter 11 We grew that business exponentially. That’s where I built my first partner ecosystem. We didn’t call it ecosystem back then, by the way, don’t my first partner channel. I was the growth engine in that company. And then I was recruited by Microsoft, by a woman by the name of Linda Secor. And for almost a decade, I was what we now call ecosystem, I was the leader of the public sector, partner business, Microsoft, and then also an adjunct member and then a direct member of the US partner leadership team. So I got to be really involved in Microsoft, they’re all levels and understand how the engine works in many respects. And when I left the organization, I had always known that partners struggled, they still struggled today, I’m sure we have conversations out in the hallways, everyone loves Microsoft. But it’s not easy, right? We know that. And that’s why we’re bringing everybody together today. We’re trying to help accelerate your success. This is what ultimate partner live is all about. It’s about accelerating your success. It started off with a podcast. But when I started the podcast seven years ago, when I left Microsoft, it was seven years ago last month, I started a podcast with a vision of getting to this moment and hopefully accelerating it from here. And the reason why is I recognized that you needed the easy button, you needed the decoder ring in order to drive your greatest results. And I saw the partners that got it right. And in fact, I started interviewing them on the podcast, and I understood Microsoft understood how to direct them. But they needed additional guidance. And being that lighthouse, that guide was where ultimate partners and ultimate partner guide ultimate partner started what Michael had to say here about aligning your purpose and mission, I think hopefully resonates with everyone in the room because Microsoft has this big bold mission. And I think we all have an opportunity whether we’re only Microsoft partners, that we’re partners with other tech giants to align our mission and our vision for success around at and my mission is to help organizations like yours leaders like you, individuals and your organizations to achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. Now, I don’t have all the answers. And I don’t I don’t I don’t say that I do. But I do have I know who the people are, that can help you get the answers. And that’s what this is all about. And that’s why we’ve assembled this meeting today the summit, and we’re going to talk about some of the steps here we’re going to talk about how we got here, we’re going to talk about our amazing sponsors and speakers. This rich agenda over the next two days, I don’t think you’ll have ever seen an agenda like this in one room. And I’m really just proud and grateful for all the people all the great leaders who come together to to be here. I want to first start with our sponsors are believers, the people who came forward, it was only 120 days ago that we said we’re gonna go do this. And it’s been a it’s been a long journey, believe it or not only 90 or 120 days. But these were the organizations that came forward and said we believe partners need the help. They need the guidance. We need to get together in person again, like this. We love digital events. I hosted a digital event we’ll talk about that. But this was an opportunity for everyone to show up in a big way. Microsoft came on in a big way became the title sponsor for the event. We’re expand say Age came on in a big way carve, ey BDO, partner tap, and archive 360. All came on as Title sponsors, and then the community who joined us in the room, some of some in the room, some not in the room. And we’ll talk about that community more through the sessions here. So I want to thank all all of those sponsors round of applause for those sponsors, by the way. Some amazing friends and believers. And I want to thank, wow, I asked a lot of people, like I knew, and what I hope I am doing here is bringing together for you what I believe to be the right people, as if we had done this as a podcast, in fact, but bring that the people in the room who can help you decode what success looks like, tell you the what and the why. But more importantly, the how to achieve your greatest results. What you need to go do in Microsoft fiscal year 24. And beyond, in order to achieve your greatest success working with Microsoft, working with the leaders here, we’ve had some amazing support. It started with a gentleman by the name of Kevin peacemaker, who you will meet later today. If you didn’t meet him last night, if you were at the reception, hopefully you got to see Kevin, he has been he’s drives an amazing book of business at Microsoft. He’s a president of the SMC business, and you’ll get to know him better. He’s got an incredible passion around growing with partner led growth and partner assisted growth. And he has been a big supporter from day one. That’s one of the reasons why we came to Las Colinas to support his townhall yesterday, and to align you all and with with his sellers. You see, we used to do things like this, right? We used to get people together, we get the sellers with the partners, we do that at Inspire we do that and other events, co selling events. We’ve been doing a lot of that digitally. And I get it we’ve had we had COVID, we’ll talk about the years we’ve had, it’s time, it’s time to bring it back live. And we’re going to do it here today. So I wanted to give you an idea of been asked a lot of people say who’s coming, who’s coming. And I really wanted a slide with all of your logos up here. But candidly, we couldn’t pull that together as quickly. But I want to thank each of you for your commitment for coming here. And being in the room. I know some of you have traveled cross country to be here. And from other locations, some some are local to Dallas, Pam, and others, and so excited to have you all in the room. But this is kind of a breakup or breakdown of who’s in the room. Right? A very large group of CSPs. We have most of the large solution partners in the room. Right? So if you’re, you know, the LSPs are there category of partners, the biggest organizations that are resellers, systems integrators now transforming their businesses that are in the room, we have a group of ISVs in the room of significant group of ISPs, a lot of SI guys in the room, a lot of companies that classify themselves as that size. And then a group of others that’s made up of organizations that didn’t classify themselves in a certain way, maybe feel they go across multiple swim lanes. That’s very true of everybody. And then also people from Microsoft and other sponsors and others that are here with us today. 270 was the capacity that we had in the room, and we reached our capacity for this event. So I want to thank everyone for joining us. I talked a little bit about this. I had been blessed to have so many amazing friends. Many of them have been guests on Ultimate Guide to partnering. It all started. When I left Microsoft and I had a coach you said you should do a podcast. And I was like what this podcast I was starting to listen to podcasts at that time. This is back I finally got an iPhone SE said it was okay to get an iPhone. And because Steve used to jump on them back in the day, I got an iPhone and started listening to Tim Ferriss and a few other podcasts. And this friend said you should do a podcast and so I asked like a dozen people. And some of them were early guests. And I said what do you think I should and I said well do this thing around partnering it’s I could help these organizations and I could we could at scale provide because even at that point Microsoft only had certain moments when you could learn about how to be successful right there was WPC became Inspire. And then maybe there’d be some other event like DTA or third event. But it was only at those touch points that partners got to hear from the tech giant. And then I also wanted you all to understand from leaders that had won an award winning partners like what did the best do I knew I knew because I was I was on the other side of the room and would meet with all these partners, right and I got to see what success looked like what the best of the best did and what they did differently and I wanted to instill that in everyone and so that’s what Ultimate Guide to partnering started out as candidly went on a went on a little bit of a hiatus. You see, I wasn’t sure where it was gonna go. i This was my vision all along, but I went back inside For two years, I went back into the largest software company in the nonprofit sector billion dollar business as their channel chief. And then I got to see from the other side, again, how organizations struggled. You see, if you work in a big company, not everybody is partner centric, not everybody’s on board, right. And I have a set of principles, operating principles. We all get it, because that’s why we’re here. But not everybody gets it. And sometimes the chief revenue officer doesn’t get it. And sometimes the CEO doesn’t get it. And sometimes the CEO, certainly the CFO doesn’t want to invest in it. And your chief marketing officers running around doing things that don’t include partners. Like, that’s crazy, right, but that’s the way our world operates. And that’s what I am on a mission to help change with all of you. And we’re going to continue to build content and support and an organization that helps you drive your greatest results. And today is day one of that. So ultimate partner has morphed. We started out this year, knowing that we wanted to get to this point. We did a couple of things. We moved the podcast more into a master class, we’d interview a bunch of leaders from organizations and try it and if you go, tell them to partner up, you type masterclass, you’ll see a bunch of episodes I did with Microsoft’s America’s had their Dagens was one of those guests, because I wanted to help you decode, like, how do you work with the tech giant, by the way, it’s not just the partner development manager, I need to work across the entire organization, I need to understand all the touch points that touch my customer. And then, you know, how do I decode that? And how do I become more successful navigating the tech giant, and then also all of these amazing guests, we decided to do a digital event, I really wanted to host an event in Seattle around inspire this, this, this more from from Seattle. The challenge with doing something around inspire, candidly, is it was all pre recorded. It was recorded weeks ahead. So in the June Microsoft event is like the middle of July, weeks ahead, it was all pre recorded. And a lot of people were leaving for vacation or going off to other trips and ventures and things. So it was impossible to pull all the leaders back in the room to after they heard what they said it inspire and bring them back in the room and say, Okay, now how do I make this successful? We couldn’t do that. We couldn’t do that in Seattle, at least in that timeframe. And it was risky. And so Rommel and I had been talking about this location, and then this opportunity came up. So what you’re gonna get in the next two days, is really a little bit of what happened did inspire, take into you in person, you’re going to hear from the leaders of Microsoft, I mean, this is an amazing lineup, you’re going to get to interact and have conversations with them about what success looks like, you’re going to be able to give them feedback on what Microsoft needs to do better and differently, going into their new fiscal year, or maybe even in the second half of this year. Second semester, this is your opportunity, this is your moment to help drive the growth of this ecosystem be part of this thing. And that’s what we’re all about today with ultimate partner live. What an amazing agenda. I mean, I couldn’t have somebody, I had a conversation with somebody about a week ago, who was new to the partner world knew nothing about Microsoft’s when are you going to throw another one of these another month or so that’s like, wait a second, this commitment, by the way to have the commitment from so many leaders, presidents, corporate vice presidents and Microsoft to come to Dallas, in the middle of the week before Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, and have a meeting like this is unheard of. It’s crazy. It’s crazy, all the leaders and you’re going to have a rich day of content. Today, you’re going to learn more than you probably have ever known about how Microsoft operates at the Americas level at the ISP level, you’re gonna hear from a leader Dan Rippy, who knows how to make it real. He’s just amazing and amazing friend, he’s been a guest on the podcast. He was part of another event I did a year ago. You’re gonna Of course, we’re taking Microsoft’s priorities for this year, right. So if you look at what was talked about inspire, there was a lot of other things that were talked about. But if you’d had to boil it down to three things, there are three major priorities within the organization, of course, AI marketplace, and this amazing opportunity around the SMC business, right. Those are the three things if you don’t come away from anything else, you’ll know that the event is structured around those three things. And bringing the leaders of those three things in the room is just remarkable. And I couldn’t do this without their support. So I just want to thank them for their support and being here in the room. And thank you so much. To me, I’ll rattle off Heather and Alvarado and Felice and Dan and I mean it’s an Anthony Joseph and we have it’s, it’s gonna be incredible couple of days. I hope you I hope you feel the energy and, and be part of this in such a big way. I want to spend a few minutes here you see, this is also why we got here. We’re living in a time like no other right. I can’t emphasize this enough. We you know, we’re In this, I call it the tectonic shifts if you go back to 19 2019. I mean, our world is radically changed since that time, right? We all live through COVID COVID. Accelerated technology advancement, right? A lot of bad things happen because of COVID. A lot of loss, but it also accelerated, Satya Nadella said that we saw seven years of transformation for seven months, other leaders have talked about how our lives have changed, right? I mean, we all just hit hit the button on our phone three times, and a box shows up at the end of the day. And we do that every day. I mean, I get Amazon deliveries twice a day, sometimes society is changing. We’re going through geopolitical time, like no other two wars. In fact, just a very sad time in terms of what’s happening in that part of the world. We’ve been going through economic headwinds, right, we’ve had massive success in terms of technology transformation. But we’ve also had the headwinds, the pullback, because everybody over invested over pivoted during COVID and then had a pullback, massive layoffs, technology companies, the technology sector hit worse than any other honestly, right, the rest of the economy has been cranking along. And because of that, we’ve had to do more with less, right? Our organizations may be scaled down, and maybe you’re doing the job of two people, or Microsoft got rid of its partner development managers, because they also laid off people. And by the way, this isn’t just Microsoft, it’s Amazon. It’s Google. And it’s, you know, you go down the list, Facebook, Facebook, and so on. Everybody did this. Some of them I’ve hired back, some of them have reappropriated resources. But the truth is, we’ve all been living with this. And then also this, like there was this comfortable notion like, oh, yeah, I have a partner developer. And then I’m sure I do this thing. And now you have to do it alone. Or you have to find other ways to do it. You have to be creative. You have to be entrepreneurial in your spirit in the way you go about your business. People are finally rail realizing though co selling is super important. And Microsoft recognizes this in a big way. And some of the shifts they’ve done with marketplace. There are if you don’t know this, there are $300 billion dollars and durable cloud budgets amongst the Big Three $300 billion. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are at the CFO level, negotiating massive contracts with the largest customers. They’re also doing that, by the way, in the SMC special hear about that from Kevin today. Opportunity. Because I remember years ago people said why don’t have to cosell with Microsoft. They don’t do anything. They don’t sell anything for us. Right? I got to report all this back. No, there’s a huge opportunity now and marketplace is the way to get there. And a lot of you in the room are resisting it. I know because I talk to all of you marketplace is the non fungible token, if you know what an NF t is, it’s the it’s the non fungible token. It’s the ability to take what we used to do with pieces of paper and proposals and budget together and all this paper process and getting our systems to talk to one another are CRMs and are our partner center and all that it takes all the friction out of the system or takes a lot of the friction out of the system. It also allows you to do what Microsoft has always called partner to partner, which I now call ecosystem like growth, which is why we’re here because there’s opportunities for all of you, you still on the pie chart to work together more effectively. I don’t want to burst your bubble. You’re not the only person your customers talking to. And Microsoft people. You’re not the only person your customers talking to your customers talking to at least seven seats at the table. My good friend Jane McBain from Canalis, who has been a big supporter and advisor to ultimate partner likes to talk about the seats at the table. You see we make the decision to buy today, as technologists or as people implementing a solution the same way we buy a vehicle. Like when I went out and got my jeep, I called all my friends that had jeeps and I asked them like what do you think about the hybrid model and you talk to the people that you trust the seats at your table, and you make your decision and the other partners that at that table are influencing your customer. So why not work together? Right, this is what partnering is all about. And by the way, the customer is not buying just a point solution. They’re stitching together a business solution to a problem that they’re trying to solve. And that problem may include one ISV to ISVs, it might include a security partner, it might need an implementation partner, it’s going to need all of those resources coming together right to drive that one solution in and marketplace helps drive that. By the way marketplace. There are a few marketplace vendors in the room organizations that deliver software, one of them will expand as a sponsor of this event. And but there are a couple of others in the room that that are also in this this part of the world that’s growing and accelerating predictions around marketplace. We’re all saying like why do I have to do this marketplace offer? Nobody sees it. Nobody’s gonna buy off of my marketplace solution like why am I doing this? That’s how you get to the durable cloud budgets. That’s how customers this is going to be. It’s going to change things. People don’t like change, right? We resist change. I got up on a stage 12 years ago and talked about the cloud opportunity in front of a bunch of channel partners that looked at me glaze eyed and said, I’m not ready for the cloud. We don’t why do we? Why do we want to sit? We want to sell PCs and targets begs, why do we want to go to the cloud? Well, guess what’s happened to that industry? Yeah, this is what’s happening with marketplace in a big way. So the predictions, and I’ve had several guests on my podcast talking about this $45 billion by 2025. That’s a low estimate of how much revenue will go through marketplaces. That’s analysis. Early estimate. Jay McBain from Canalis, said we under called it I had he and other leaders on an episode and we talked about it 50 is probably still under cutting it. And in fact, tackle who just released their survey has predicted $100 billion will flow through marketplaces by the end of 2026. That’s three years from now. 100 billion dollars. CrowdStrike is already doing a billion dollars through marketplaces, that tells you that it’s an opportunity for growth, it’s another channel, it’s another route to market. It’s not the only route to market. But if you don’t embrace this moment, and this is Microsoft’s marketplace moment, this year, you’ll hear much more about this over the next two days. You need to embrace we need to pivot you need to understand it. My again, Jay, he’s not even here. But because he’s hosting his own event. Canalis is having their conference in Palm Springs this week. I couldn’t plan the timing of this any better. But he’s called this the decade of the ecosystem. And I I’ve embraced this deck this ecosystem LED or this partner led growth model, because I believe we used to call partner to partner but it never did it justice, right. We talked about the seven seats. There’s one ecosystem by the way, you’re all part of this ecosystem. 1981, Bill Gates went to Boca Raton, Florida. And that’s what started the ecosystem. Now if you know what happened, he signed an agreement with IBM to license his software to IBM, not sell his software license it and they also license the PC components so that companies like Dell, and Compaq, and CW and other makers and resellers could come to become businesses, right. And that didn’t really exist in a big way Microsoft has was that really created it spark the ecosystem in 1981, whether it even recognizes it to this day it did it. And that ecosystem is now over 400,000, strong, representing all of you, and you know, another 399,700 or something that aren’t in this room, but are recognized in the Microsoft ecosystem. This movement is real, it’s all going to be about partner to partner, which means working more closely with the tech giant means working more closely with each other, which is why you’re all in the room. Because there’s opportunities for partner to partner. And you know, one of the big things I get from people when we talk about not going to inspire not having an Inspire is you would walk the hallway in Vegas. And at the end of those three days, your your business, your book of business, your your your strategy for the year was planned. And you can’t do that digitally, candidly. So that’s why we’re here. And that’s where we’re going to continue to build that. So this is a moment I could talk about the principles. I will hopefully tomorrow if we have time. But pivoting agility is one of the most important principles of success in successful partnering. And it’s the time you either gonna resist the change, you’re gonna pivot your business, or candidly, you don’t want to hear this you’re become extinct. Or you’ll be marginalized in a small little piece. Maybe Maybe you’ll find a niche, but you won’t grow your business successfully unless you learn Announcer 23:53 to pivot. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide t

Dec 19, 2023 • 48min

Holiday Encore – Unleashing Partner Business Growth in 2024!

Dec 17, 2023 • 26min

Holiday Encore – John Jester: Reshaping Veeam’s Future with a Partner-First Approach

Dec 16, 2023 • 20min

Holiday Encore – Google Cloud: Unlocking a $30 Billion Opportunity for Tech Leaders

Google’s Ecosystem Leader for North America Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® We are bringing you some of the best episodes of 2023 to help you prepare for success in 2024; this one is part of a MASTERCLASS Series working with Google Cloud. Google Cloud is approaching a $30 billion business, ranking it number three of the leading cloud providers, or “hyperscalers.” Google Cloud creates a massive opportunity for partners to help Google’s customers take full advantage of their cloud environments by providing the ecosystem of additional services, platforms, and expertise only partners can provide. If you’re a technology leader, looking to learn how to grow your business effectively, don’t miss this exclusive Ultimate Guide to Partnering series Precision Partnering, where I’m joined by the Google Cloud leaders driving the partnership business to help define what it takes to partner with Google effectively. Jim Anderson, VP of Google Cloud North America, Partner Ecosystem and Channels, joins me to kick off this critical series of the podcast, Precision Partnering Masterclass. In this episode, Jim and I explore the ins and outs of Google’s mission to drive growth and accelerate customer outcomes through their partner ecosystem, and how Google infuses the right mindset into the selling organization. We also discuss the emergence of marketplaces, and the exciting opportunities in store partnering with Google. In Jim’s words As an Executive on Google’s Cloud team and a board member for Altair (NASDAQ: ALTR), Jim has more than 25 years of experience with some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Hewlett Packard (HP), Dell, and Cisco. Jim works with customers and partners to leverage emerging Cloud, AI/ML, and Data Analytics technologies to accelerate Digital Transformation by driving data-powered innovation. Jim is known for his experience in helping businesses, at an inflection point, take advantage of market transitions. He has been described as a thought leader with the agility to make an impact that matters. Throughout his career (including six years with Global responsibility), Jim has successfully run businesses that help customers leverage digital technologies to drive efficiencies and enter new markets. He has been selected as one of the “Most Influential Black Americans in Corporate America” (2020 Savoy Magazine) and a “Best of Biz 2015” award winner in the Executive of the Year category. What You’ll Learn Jim Anderson’s Role & Mission. 3:00 How Google Infuses a “Value Mindset” into the Organization. 5:08 Google’s Response to Generative AI. 9:15 What makes a great partner? 10:08 What does it take to Partner with Google? 13:26 What to expect from The Precision Partnering Masterclass Series? 15:39 Exclusively Sponsored By Google Cloud This episode of the podcast is exclusively sponsored by Google Cloud. Google Cloud’s mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business. More than any other top cloud provider; Google Cloud as unique capabilities to meet customers’ needs across four areas. Data, Trust, Open Infrastructure, and Collaboration, all underpinned by Sustainable Technology. Learn more at cloud.google.com On becoming, The Ultimate Partner™ At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, who drive the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems. With this exciting new Masterclass Series, Ultimate Partnerships becomes The Ultimate Partner™ More than just a new look, The Ultimate Partner is doubling its commitment to helping YOU become the Ultimate Partner by getting it right. Do you want to be The Ultimate Partner? Visit our NEW website. Other Noteworthy Episodes Featuring Google Cloud https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/159-google-transforms-the-future-of-healthcare-and-what-it-means-to-you/ https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/146-a-top-google-sales-leader-investing-in-partners-to-fuel-hyper-growth/ https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/140-one-google-executive-applies-10x-mindset-to-improve-healthcare-outcomes/ Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS partnering, customers, google, organization, ultimate guide, partner ecosystem, leveraging, partnerships, success, marketplace, mindset, google cloud, journey, jim, ai, solutions, business, cloud, drive, listeners SPEAKERS Vince Menzione, Jim Anderson, Announcer Vince Menzione 00:00 At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, the ones driving the greatest influence and impact on our world of ecosystems. With their latest earnings results, Google Cloud is approaching a $30 billion business, ranking it number three of the leading cloud providers, or hyperscalers. This creates a massive opportunity for you as partners to help Google’s customers take full advantage of their cloud environments by providing the ecosystem of additional services, platforms, and expertise only partners like you can provide. So if you’re a technology leader, looking to learn how to grow your business effectively, then you won’t want to miss this exclusive Ultimate Guide to Partnering series Precision Partnering. In this series, I’m joined by the Google leaders driving the partnership business to help define what it takes to partner with Google effectively. Announcer 01:08 This is the ultimate guide to partnering with the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione. Vince Menzione 01:28 Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host today. I welcome Jim Anderson is vice president of Google Cloud in North America, partner ecosystem and channels. And he joins me to kick off this important series of podcast precision partnering. In this episode, Jim and I explore the ins and outs of Google’s mission to drive growth and accelerate customer outcomes through their partner ecosystem, and how Google infuses the right mindset of value mindset into the selling organization. We also discuss the emergence of marketplaces, and the exciting opportunities in store partnering with Google. I hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion. As much as I enjoyed welcoming back, Jim Anderson. This episode of the podcast is exclusively sponsored by Google Cloud. Google clouds mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business more than any other top cloud provider, Google Cloud as unique capabilities to meet the needs of customers across four areas. Data Trust, open infrastructure and collaboration, all underpinned by sustainable technology, learn more@cloud.google.com. Jim, welcome back to the podcast. Jim Anderson 03:00 Hey, Vince, it’s great to be back. Thanks for having me. Vince Menzione 03:03 I am so excited to welcome you back to Ultimate Guide to Partnering to kick off this special series of episodes, we’re calling Precision Partnering Jim Anderson 03:12 for vision partner, I look forward to talk to you about it. So you’re the leader of Vince Menzione 03:17 Google’s North American partner organization. But for our listeners who might have missed our last episode, Episode 157, can you define your organization’s role and mission? Jim Anderson 03:29 Sure events. As you mentioned, my name is Jim Anderson. I am the Vice President of Google Cloud, North America partner ecosystem and channels, and part of the North America sales executive team. Google’s cloud mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business. The mission of our partner organization simply builds on this mission to leverage our ecosystem to help customers maximize their return on Google technologies as they go through this transformation journey. Vince Menzione 04:00 Jim, that’s a massive mission. And we’re going to spend these next series of episodes going through that in greater detail. But what’s the essence? Jim Anderson 04:09 Well, that’s we are extremely focused on delivering differentiated partnerships that produce the business outcomes that our customers are demanding and expect Google’s best in class technologies empower organizations to really harness their data to provide actionable insights. While leveraging the best and most secure open infrastructure. We also enable industry transformation through AI and ML capabilities are a hot topic right now. And we combine this with applications from our partner ISPs, and with implementation assistance from our solution partners to ensure customer success. So Jim, Vince Menzione 04:43 our last episode was a fan favorite. And in that interview, we discussed how your leader Thomas Kurian, has put a stake in the ground when it comes to partnerships. His announcement that all deals must have a partner attached to them. And he’s gone on and been on other podcasts since where he’s talked about the importance of partnering to Google. How does this approach impact how you’re investing to drive the growth in the business? Jim Anderson 05:08 I know one of the things we talked about during our last podcast was having a value mindset. Google’s business approach starts there, as our focus is on the outcome versus just the transaction. Partnering for us is just not about partnering with the companies we work with. It’s also about partnering with customers for their digital transformation journey. If one truly believes in a value mindset, then partnering with an establishing a solid ecosystem of partners that can ensure the success of this journey is non negotiable. I would say we have this mindset throughout our entire organization, starting at the top in my previous role I responsible for our South Central region. And what I have observed that when it comes to transformational deals, we never went alone. Vince Menzione 05:57 I love the fact that you bring a seller’s mindset, this value mindset. Can I borrow that? I really love that term. You mentioned it last time and I talked about growth mindset. I talked about partner led mindset, but value mindset really nails it in terms of the customer, right showing up with the right value for the customer. Jim Anderson 06:17 Exactly. Our value mindset encourages our sales team to involve partners in most of their deals. In North America, we have launched partnering with precision initiative to support a win win environment for our customers, our partners, and Google. This includes investments in key areas like ISP, cosell partner service capability, and differentiated solutions with a goal of accelerating customer outcomes and maximizing impact. How do we improve the value that we bring to customers, because we want to be a partner for their whole cloud transformation journey. Vince Menzione 06:55 So since our last discussion marketplaces have truly taken center stage Canalis predicts that the marketplace opportunity mostly focused on the hyper scalars, like Google will exceed $45 billion. It’s an astounding number by 2025, can you help our listeners better understand that opportunity for partners working with Google, Jim Anderson 07:19 we’re really excited about this emerging digital channel, we see the same growth opportunity for marketplace that many of the analysts see. But marketplace creates a win for not just the customer, but also for Google and the partner, from our customer perspective, marketplace greatly reduces the friction of trying new technologies. And your cloud environment allows customers to increase their ROI associated with their spending commit, by leveraging both first party and third party products against that commit, that’s when a partner, it can greatly reduce the procurement cycles associated with their software. And by Google mounting it to count towards the commit, increasing the financial incentives for a customer to use their product. from a Google perspective, it helps customers take full advantage of our platform, and really optimize their spin in the cloud over time. Vince Menzione 08:15 So Jim, from my perspective, as well, I believe it takes the friction out of the partnering right, it becomes in many respects, the non fungible token that allows the organization’s to go to market more effectively. Would you agree here? Jim Anderson 08:29 I definitely agree. What we’re working on, and you’ll hear me talk about it often is how do you remove the friction, and bringing this whole ecosystem together to increase the value we bring the partners and reduce their time to value and marketplace is right along the lines and making that happen? Vince Menzione 08:46 such exciting times ahead? I’m so excited for this next couple of years for marketplaces. And for Google. We talked about this earlier in AI has been in the news quite a bit. I’d be remiss if we didn’t have a discussion about AI, the open AI initiative chat GPT. And I know that Google has been front and center when it comes to AI and AI initiatives. I was wondering how Google is responding to what’s out in the marketplace right Jim Anderson 09:15 now. I don’t think Google is responding to that. I think we’ve been involved. As you mentioned, for a long time with AI, we have a long history of AI and bringing innovative technologies leveraging AI to market. As you know, we include it with a lot of the applications that we bring the market, right. The key thing is how do you leverage AI to really make a difference with the customers in our society in a positive way. And that’s really what we’re focusing on as an organization. Based on our history around AI. We’re looking to leverage large language models are capabilities around conversational AI, and what we do with search in ways that are unique to the industry. It’s exciting because AI will change the way that people enter Aqua technologies, Google will be on the forefront of that, working with our partners and customers in ways that benefits their organization. So Jim, Vince Menzione 10:08 over the last six years, I’ve been following what’s been going on in our tech sector this transformational time. And I’ve been watching Google’s rise through my own experiences, working with organizations, and the interviews I get to do with great guests and partners. What do you believe it takes to be a great partner working with Google, Jim Anderson 10:29 we want our partner ecosystem be a multiplier of success with our customers. I know the previous episode, and I talked about the principle of one plus one equals one, when it’s really a multiplier effect. And I know my math was bad. But in other words, we’re focused on how do we remove the friction? How do we come together as a joint success model, realizing that neither of us can do it alone is critical to our mindset, and our success. What I did was work with partners that have focused on expanding customer reach vast and building capacity around digital transformation, and are committed to co innovation with us, there’s a lot of opportunity for innovation, and how we engage with partners, really is just beginning to surface with some of the technologies out there in the marketplace. And I look forward to taking advantage of it as we move forward. And really improving how we bring value to our customers. Vince Menzione 11:23 Jim, I love what you had to say about one plus one equals one. And I know you were a math minor, for instance. So Jim Anderson 11:31 map, I don’t know if it’s showing right now. Vince Menzione 11:35 But I think the point is well served in that really going back to the customer. And then all of the partner precision what we’re talking about here, because it’s not just one partner, it’s not a transaction like it was several years ago, it takes a group of organizations coming together, we could use the term stitching here, but bringing together the value for the customer in the right way, we’re going to learn how your organization comes together, and supports that customer with the right value mindset, Jim Anderson 12:05 exactly the right value mindset, where we can bring the right partner with the right experience at the right time to take them on that journey and be a mentor for them on that journey as they move along it. Vince Menzione 12:17 I’m so excited to bring this to our listeners. But what about the partners that don’t get it right? And then don’t get partnering? Right? What was the kryptonite? Jim Anderson 12:26 The biggest issue I see with partners that have struggled with us is their lack of focus on what some call year to journey and the cloud partners that mostly invest in acquisition with little investment and ensuring the success of their customers cloud journey, tend to struggle and fall short of expectations, that transaction doesn’t produce the win. It’s the journey that determines success. Our goal is really to make our customers a superhero on their cloud journey, and partners and Google Cloud, Jim act as their mentor to help them on that journey. I think kryptonite happens when one loses this perspective. So I always encourage partners to think customer first and keep the right perspective, understanding that we are here to help customers who are going from where they are today through our journey, and we need to invest in their success. And I think what Vince Menzione 13:21 I hear it’s not a one and done type of transactional model in the cloud. In that you are building right you’re you’re innovating new solutions. Google’s platform is known for having so many innovative aspects and workloads that you’re really helping them reimagine their business. And that’s a long process. Jim Anderson 13:39 Exactly right. It is long process. And what customers want is they want to partner for that process, right? They’re not looking for us to simply drive a transaction they’re looking for us to share in their success journey. And that’s what we want to do. Vince Menzione 13:53 So Jim, what advice would you have for our listeners, they’re going to be joining this series of episodes this masterclass precision partnering on optimizing for their success. Working with Google Jim Anderson 14:04 lasting partnerships are all about finding a key win for all the stakeholders involved. I encourage partners that are looking to understand how best to work with Google to first understand how we measure success. I believe success is measured differently in a consumption business versus a transaction business. I always suggest they have a story of how they drive that success for us. And it’s easy for our sales teams to understand. This means understanding your value mindset, and that we are focused on driving digital transformation, and customer acquisition, leveraging our platform. I also believe that focus is a key success factor when trying to partner a global set the Salesforce has a clear understanding of your value proposition and when best to engage. At the same time, many customers see the complexity of their environment increasing as they try to take advantage of multi cloud and hybrid environments. They see partners To help them remove some of that friction that we’ve already talked about, we are looking for partners that want to double down with us to build the technical capacity to help customers accelerate their digital journey. Every customer’s journey is a little different. Agility is important in our world. So we’re looking for partners that are able to adapt to ensure our customer success no matter where they are in their cloud journey. Vince Menzione 15:22 I love what you have to say on a few fronts here, right, the doubling down talks about commitment. And then you mentioned agility, which is one of my favorite aspects of successful partnering is that organizations need to understand when they need to pivot when there’s new opportunity areas and take advantage of those opportunity areas. So I know we want all of our listeners to think about those things as we go through these next episodes. But Jim, can you take us through what our listeners will hear from and what they can expect in this precision partnering series at the podcast, Jim Anderson 15:54 Google is trying to leverage his partner ecosystem to bring maximize value to our customers, we approach the market with four pillars when it comes to our partner organization. We have the ISP pillar, which we invest in CO sell with, we have a resale pillar that’s more of a traditional value added reseller pillar, which we work to bring value to our customers that want to work with resellers. We also have a technical enablement to learn because the services associated with our partners, and the customers that need those services are critical. And we have this focus on service delivery, excellence. And we also have a solutions pillar, right? Because we believe that the partner ecosystem can be a differentiator for us in the market. And we’re going to do that with horizontal and industry solutions. As we move forward. I often talk about this concept of a trifecta where Google is the platform, ISPs offer a solution. And we have implementation partners that can come together to take that ensure success of that solution with the customers and who we hear from from your team. You’re gonna hear from Rob Harper, who’s responsible for Channel Sales and how he’s leveraging precision partnering to really drive value with our resell partners in the market. You’ll also hear from Chris Voss, who’s responsible for what we call our service partner. A lot of people know them as GSI as the global system integrators. And they’ll talk about how we’re leveraging our service partners to ensure customer success. We also have Clyde de Souza, who’s responsible for partner engineering organization, and working with customers to drive their technical enablement and making sure they have the capabilities needed to ensure success of digital transformation and our customers. You’ll hear from Scott Bertelsen, who leads our ISV organization and you’ll talk about how we’re leveraging ISPs and partnering with them on cosell to make sure that we’re bringing value to our customers. And last but not least, you’ll hear from Rebecca Potts, who’s responsible for our solutions, pillar driving business outcomes with our customers in leveraging the solutions we bring to market as a differentiator for us. So that’s the team. Hopefully, it’ll be a great conversation. Vince Menzione 18:09 So excited to take our listeners through this precision partnering journey, pulling together all that Google offers to support the customer. Jim Anderson 18:20 Well, thanks, Mick. It is really exciting to be back. I love listening to your podcasts. And I love the thought leadership that you are driving when it comes to partnering in the marketplace, and really the partner ecosystem, I believe, fundamentally over the next three years, you’ll see a lot of innovation when it comes to partnering, and how we partner three years down the road, we’re probably a lot different than how we partner today. And I’m glad that I’ll be able to be a part of that journey. Vince Menzione 18:47 So for our listeners, stay tuned for precision partnering in these next several episodes. So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive, and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it. We all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail. And at ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. Announcer 19:45 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner we’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering

Dec 13, 2023 • 34min

Holiday Encore – How Did a Channel Juggernaut Pivot to Become a Leading Solutions Provider?

Insight President, Dee Burger, Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® We are bringing you some of the best episodes of 2023 to help you prepare for success in 2024; this one is a MASTERCLASS in Transformation. Note this interview was recorded well before Insight’s acquisition of SADA, stay tuned as we plan to bring Dee Burger back soon to discuss what’s next! In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses constantly seek innovative solutions to stay ahead of the competition. One of the biggest game-changers in recent years has been the transformation to cloud computing, and its impact on businesses of all sizes cannot be overstated. This shift to the cloud was a turning point for one solution integrator, taking them from a transactional business model to a leading player in the industry. How did a channel juggernaut pivot to become a leading solutions provider? In this Ultimate Guide to Partnering episode, we are thrilled to be joined by Dee Burger, President of Insight North America, who shares with us Insight’s ride and how he is leveraging his vast experience to drive growth and success. Join us as we explore why Insight’s customers and partners trust them to deliver top-notch solutions to achieve their ambitious business goals. In Insight’s Words Dee Burger assumed the role of President of Insight North America in May 2022. He leverages extensive IT industry knowledge to help clients maximize the value of technology so they can achieve their most ambitious technology goals. He leads the Insight North America business, including partner management, Insight Public Sector, commercial and enterprise sales, and solutions delivery. Burger drives Insight’s evolution into an industry-recognized solutions integrator, helping organizations accelerate their digital transformation journey. Burger is a 29-year veteran of Capgemini, where he excelled in various roles. His vast experience includes leading mergers and acquisitions, digital and cloud solutions, business applications, consulting, strategy, and transformation. What You’ll Learn What has it been like for Insigth to pivot? 4.25 If you get more valuable to your customer, your business will do better 9:46 What are some of the characteristics of great partners? 20:01 Can partnerships become practical and tangible to the customer? 22:37 Whom would you invite to your dinner party? 27:51 Partnering with Insight Partner with Insight Quickly Find Interviews with all these Amazing Guests Partner Ecosystem Leader Episodes 163 – A Partnership Leader Uniquely Growing Hubspot’s Ecosystem Community 162 – How You Can Unleash the Power of Data to 10X Your Partner Growth! 153 – Janet Schijins – Ecosystems & Megacosm 150- Celebrating 150 Amazing Episodes with a Five-Timer Guest, Jay McBain 149 – WTF is an Ecosystem? And How Partner Hacker helps tech companies PartnerUp with Jared Fuller LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS insight, partner, world, customers, partnerships, business, partnering, people, integrator, solutions, client, organization, services, capgemini, companies, market, dabo, adapt, years, technology SPEAKERS Announcer, Dee Burger, Vince Menzione Vince Menzione 00:00 How the transformation to the cloud pivoted this juggernaut in the channel from being a transactional engine to becoming a leading solutions integrator. For my next episode of ultimate guide to partnering, I’m joined by the North American leader for this top solutions integrator in our space, who’s taking this business to the next level to help its customers achieve their most ambitious business goals. This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione. Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and today I will deburr is the president of insight North America and shares with our listeners. How he’s applying is over 30 years experience that a leading consultancy to help insight achieve its mission and why customers and partners should rely on insight. I hope you enjoy this episode. As much as I enjoyed welcoming D burger. I’m so excited to welcome athletic greens as the latest sponsor to ultimate guide to partnering friends who know me well know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 20 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being. About five years ago I added athletic greens and now their product ag one has become my go to green drink supplement. Ag one is packed with 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods or superfoods, probiotics and antigens. It literally is replaced every vitamin in my cabinet. If you’d like to give ag one a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D and five travel packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athletic greens.com forward slash Vince M. D welcome to the podcast. Dee Burger 02:28 Thanks Vince happy to be here. Vince Menzione 02:30 I am so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You’re the president for insight in North America, a fortune 500 solutions integrator and accompany with a rich history in this technology sector we all care about. So welcome. Dee Burger 02:45 Thank you, Vince. Thank you. Vince Menzione 02:47 So for our listeners who may not know you, can you tell us a little bit more about D Berger, and your mission at InSite? Dee Burger 02:54 Absolutely the me parts easy part because I am the world’s foremost expert on that after 53 years, I got to Insight a little less than a year ago. And my role as you as you said is I run the North American business for insight which is about 80% of insight. Insight is across North America, EMEA and APAC. From my vantage point I spent 30 years at Capgemini. Before this did a very wide variety of things that that have been helpful. So far in my tenure at InSite. I live in a little place called Kiawah Island, which is off of Charleston, South Carolina, which for those of you looking at a map because really convenient to go from Kiawah Island to Phoenix, Arizona where insights headquarters is right outside of Phoenix and Chandler on the Insight side, as you said long heritage insight is 35 years old this year and has a really interesting history from starting off as a product reseller small product reseller got bigger acquired a bunch of companies became a really big product reseller. And now we’re pivoting to what you refer to as a solutions integrator that we think is really unique in the market and something that is going to help us build a an even better future than the proud history so far. Vince Menzione 04:04 Yes. So a couple of comments here from my side. First of all, cue Island is absolutely a beautiful location. I lived in the Charleston area for a couple of years, just a few years back. So what a great location to be located in and insight. I know so well from my early days at Microsoft are big reseller partner, Microsoft, and we’re early to pivot, right. We were moving everyone was moving to the cloud about 10 years ago and this time of transformation and the business models were changing. And Insight was on the forefront of that and has been leading this transformative time that we’re seeing and you really expanded your footprint. And I was hoping you could expand on with us and with our listeners today on like what that’s looked like how that pivot has happened. Yeah, I Dee Burger 04:47 think it’s a good one it to me. It goes back to my initial discussions with insight which a little over a year ago, Joyce Mullen is our CEO Joyce had been here predated me by about a year and a Half Joyce had moved from my role now into the CEO role was about 10 days into the journey. And we had a discussion about being a solution integrator, I looked inside, I saw some of the history, I saw some of the different things that go on in the business. One of the questions I had was, why would you be interested in me, we got into the discussion about how you actually can take what has gone on in the product business and the depth that is required to be successful in that business, and pair it with a really successful services model. And what what the integration of that would look like, I had to then go interpret it. And Joyce has a big background, Adele knows all there is to know about that product business and how that works. I knew that she needed to fortify herself a bit in the services area, I had to then interpret what is this retailer model? I was aware of it certainly but but hadn’t spent a lot of time on it. It’s got an image people talking about a bar, and it’s somewhere between a medium and negative connotation when they talk about that. In reality, as you started taking, what is that really? Okay, what is it really for insight when I had to interpret, we got 2000 salespeople with 29,000 customers. So it’s this tremendous set of coverage, we have 500 architects with depth into exactly where the leading product companies in the world are going with their products. And a true understanding how that goes. We have 6500 partners and relationships with them, we have a full scale set of set of capabilities, to manage logistics, configurations, all of that with physical devices, and to perform the physical services go with it, then we have all the things I was used to at Capgemini. We have all the applications go to the cloud and the ability to do it all as a managed service. So a lot of that, for me was being able to effectively interpret what does that mean, and how do you bring it. And so what we’ve done is we’ve put it together as a solutions integrated thing about what it does for a client, right, so we break our client segments largely into commercial, corporate and enterprise, small, medium large, for a small client where we have, we’ve got the ability to access a wide range of technology, they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. And the enterprise had gone all the way to the top, we’ve got the ability to do services, projects for them with a variety of things and and to also be able to do specialized sorts of procurement, that will be harder for them to do where it really comes together is in the middle of that. Imagine yourself as CIO of a $3 billion company, and you’re trying to figure out the latest phase of how you’re helping to evolve your company, there’s a very, you want to do something, you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know what you need, you don’t know how to get it, you don’t know how to get it implemented, you’re trying to stretch your team has been doing a certain thing for a year history, but you’re trying to stretch to a new area, we’ve got the ability to help them figure out the problem, to put ourselves in their shoes to figure out what the best technology choices are, how to buy them, what they should be bought at how to bring it together and a reasonable way how to actually stand it up for it for them. And then and then how to run it as a managed services long term. So when we talk about being a solutions, integrator really is taking all the strengths from the product world and all the strengths from what people think about as the system integrator world, and bring them together in a in a unique way with a level of reach that the system integrators would could never have based on the weight of their models, but would frankly never ultimately attempt to get into because of the way we can we can recognize the sheer number of touch points we have Vince Menzione 08:33 what strikes me and that what your comments there are having known the old model before, right, we used to call it the transaction model. Organizations like insight, were very good at going beyond the transaction model, again, applying a level of services to support I think back in the early days of Wi Fi and some of those early implementations of technologies, imaging, computers, things like that, and applying that. And then the SI is we’re doing this other thing up here, right, but then relying on the insights of the world, you bring it all together. Now as I think about it, right? You’re bringing this, you’re bringing the whole solution set together and being a one one place that an organization can go to deliver that and you said the 3000 person organization, they may not work with a Capgemini, they may they’re looking for something extreme or midway between that right and then what they’re seeing on the transaction side is very hollow. I mean, not not to be subject or to look negatively on the channel. But there’s that transaction piece is not getting you what you need to get to an organization’s in this world of SAS in this world of hyperscalers. They’re looking for somebody to bring it all together, right? They’re looking for the ISV solutions to layer on top and create a great stitch together a complete solution for their organization, Dee Burger 09:45 no question about me. Our premise is if you get more and more valuable to the customer, your business is going to do better in a linear sort of way. So all of that for us is trying to be more effective in solving customer problems. And Vince Menzione 09:59 you brought up a really into Just one point here, right? Like you don’t look like from your pedigree and your background, your typical person that came out of the transactional world, right? The typical mold, there is somebody who came from that world. You came from Capgemini and spent 30 years in a very different environment. What does that look like to you? And how are you helping to lead that evolution? Dee Burger 10:20 It’s an interesting one is it to evolution is a good word. So insights got a lot bigger services business, then we’re generally credited as having. So it’s a roughly billion dollar services business that has been built with a lot of acquisitions that would have looked like things kept them I would have acquired along the way, hardcore cloud skills, data skills, application skills, that type of stuff. I will say, when I first got here, one of the comments I made to Joyce was, I felt a little bit like a zebra and a field full of horses. And that is different I was I was the odd one. I feel like there’s a lot more zebras. Now, there are a lot more zebras that just didn’t recognize the zebras. As soon as you got out closer in the field, you realized there were a lot more stripes out there than that, then you realized in our services team. So there’s that I think, I think the two aspects that are unique from from my background that I’m able to bring to insight. One is services is not services is not services, right? So if you think about Capgemini, Capgemini, they had business lines. So doing management, consulting, doing finance and accounting, outsourcing, building an application, assisting with engineering, very, very different things, different buyers, different value propositions, in many ways. That’s what we’re talking about it inside of the solution integrator, we’ve got a wide range of things we can do for customers, very few scenarios would say, All right, let’s stitch them all together in one big pile, right. So it’s about how you have different faces to a customer, you work within their problem set, you put yourselves in their shoes really worked to help solve their problems. And then you go back into the, into the kitchen and figure out which ingredients you need to pull together to do it. So in some ways, that’s a it’s a very similar path. The other one is I got to Capgemini and kept doing when I was small, right. So the Capgemini entered was a part of Gemini consulting in the US and early 90s, it was $120 million. I left when it was, I don’t know, 23,000,000,020 4 billion, something like that. And so a lot of the steps along the way to scaling are things that insight is going through, starting off in a much more advanced position than the Capgemini I entered ultimately. But a lot of the things you do to scale to industrialize your processes to think bigger with regards to client or other aspects that that I’ve been able to bring. Vince Menzione 12:36 So you brought up, you brought up the bigger picture of Capgemini. And what that was, what is in sight and what isn’t, is kind of the million dollar question there. Dee Burger 12:47 I think it’s a good one. We’re never going to attempt to be Accenture, right, put Accenture out as the goal to Accenture’s got 800,000 plus or minus people now, doing all kinds of things. Where our unique opportunity is, is the way we fuse our two worlds together. Like if you if you go back and think about a Santa Monica, you go from selling to architecture to partners to warehousing and logistics to configuration to physical services, applications, managed services. There are companies in the world that compete with us in every one of those markets in no one of those things, are we the biggest company in the market, but there are no companies in the world. They’re bigger than that than us and each of those, right so our ability to provide balance our ability to solve problems in a more holistic way in the system integrator world, when you think about infrastructure, most of the time, that’s something the clients dealing with. That’s right. There’s a project plan and there’s an element in that project plan that says at some point somebody buys stuff, right? And in the reseller world, it really is all about you starting with the product just starting with what do we have to sell? You’re not starting necessarily with what the client’s problems are. What do we have to sell and how do we get them to buy more we’re we’re able to bring it together, start with the customers problems bring the right ingredients each time, the secret to Insight success, both now we’ve had a very good run of late but but even more so in the future is how to bring all that together. And that’s where our very resolute focuses. Vince Menzione 14:21 Many organizations are learning to do more with less. And as you think about how you’re going to reach your revenue targets this year, I recommend you check out partner tab. A founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering partner taps pipeline discovery and CO selling platform will help your channel and sales teams to hit their revenue targets faster. Even with fewer resources. Partners app gives your team’s the new automation and partner data. You need to source more pipeline and close deals faster with your best partners. You can find out more information At partner tap.com. So focus on the customer, how are you training or evolving your sales organization to be more of that versus the old model? Dee Burger 15:12 It’s an interesting one, we talked about this one a lot. Part of the answer is, there’s still a lot of specialized selling, right? It’s not like with, with a couple 1000 salespeople and 29,000 customers, it’s not like each of the 2020 9000 customers has to have the full conversation about everything. And so we’re really starting about thinking about in tears, we are we are a different insight to different tiers of the market. And we want to make intentional choices about customers, and where we focus. So at the top, call it 100 clients, we want to bring the full insight, we want to ultimately be in their strategic roadmap, we want to think about that relationship, not just next month, but next year, or three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, what role do we play in our clients business? And how do we help them along bringing what we have, ultimately, we’re not doing that for 29,000 customers. And so so the sales team really has to evolve with a range of people that are specialized in the different things we do, and then have a reasonably limited set of people that are expected to bring it all together and have a different type of kind of connected discussion. But it’s, but it’s important, the sales team that I met when I first got insight I was blown away by and I was really surprised not I didn’t have a negative expectation was gonna see. But the professionalism was, was absolutely fantastic. The question for us and the way we strategically position the business is always going to be balancing that specialist generalist line. And getting that in the right position to make sure we’re talking to our clients about the right things. Vince Menzione 16:47 Yeah. And I’ve seen it firsthand. I mean, I’ve been to your facilities in Tempe and been close to your team over the years that I was at Microsoft, let’s talk about these times we’ve been living in right, there’s still some headwinds. I mean, we we call this a time like no other when we were going through the COVID pandemic. And now, we’ve been dealing with the economic headwinds, right, what are you seeing now that you didn’t expect to see during these times? And how are you achieving success during these times? Dee Burger 17:14 I agree in that, no matter how crazy you think the world is, today, the odds are, it seems is going to be crazier tomorrow. You know, and it has been, it has been truly a wild ride for, let’s call it the last three years, doesn’t appear to be settling down anytime soon. So we don’t really bank a strategy upon that. The key way I think about it, and framing it is you go back into the old old days of 2019, the world was, for the most part in a series of equilibriums. Right there were there were enough PC shipments for people that needed them. There were enough lifeguards, for beaches, there were enough restaurant workers for restaurants, there was enough whatever for whatever, right, it had largely gotten into a into a balance. In 2020 2020. Everything was disrupted, immediately every equilibrium in the world was thrown off translated their market. So you take the end user devices, they actually, you know, in a strange sense shot straight up, right, you know, in a market that usually grew in line with population or GDP in some in some proportion, minus of innovations and product releases and stuff like that, all of a sudden, when when you’re actually working from both home and from the office, you need new devices, that market went crazy, that’s now kind of crusted and trying to find its own equilibrium services in the very beginning of that almost shut down. I remember sitting around thinking, you know, what, if this market gets cut by half, what do you do? How do you manage through that, and then had a huge boom of a couple years as as customers and companies realize that the people that and a time of uncertainty, like COVID was the people at the biggest disadvantage were those that had not invested in their technology, and that weren’t on that curve. And so there’s an over investment for a couple of years and services, probably the last two years have probably been the best two years in the history of the services industry that’s going to normalize as well. So when you look at that, you say, All right, it’s going to continue to be unpredictable, we’re not really going to know exactly what’s going to happen. What do you do? First thing you do is you focus, focus on the customer, if you’re doing a great job for your customer. And if you’re really delivering value into their business, you’re not going to be the one that that gets reduced, you’re going to continue to grow. The second one, though, Against this backdrop is how do you build resilience into the business model so that as things shoot up, or shrink or modulate over time, how do we make sure that we’re along for that ride, and really doing a good job and being dynamic with it. And then the third one is you just keep paying attention and you’re, you’re ready to adapt, as you need to adapt and aware that the things you take for granted one day may or may not be the same market conditions you might face next week. Vince Menzione 19:57 You brought up a really good point first of all focusing on The customer is super important here. But I picked up on what I like to refer to as agility. Right? And I think it’s I think it’s a characteristic of great partners or great organizations that understand how to partner is having those listening mechanisms like how do you how are you listening to the customer? How are you listening to the market? And how are you pivoting? When you need to? Is there anything special you think about when you think about agility? Dee Burger 20:22 That honestly, I think you said, it’s, there’s all kinds of noise, right? So several 1000 People talking to 10s of 1000s of customers, everything’s out there. The question is, as an organization, are you hearing it? Are you are you hearing it? And are you interpreting it? Or are you acting on it? My view of it, and some of the things we’ve adapted is creating sort of a periodic forum, so that you turn it into a discipline around how you adapt. The good news for me at that insight is I’m still so new, Everything’s new. Right? So I haven’t had time to get into some sort of rhythm where we’re things could get stale yet. But we talk about it as we a very tight knit leadership team, we talk a lot about the dynamics in the market, we review it as a team, at least once a month, have those discussions talk about where to adapt. And so I think the key is make sure your ears are open, you’re you’ve got the ability to interpret and you’re willing, a big part of it is the willingness to adapt. Vince Menzione 21:20 So valued advice there. And he talked about I think, was 6500 partners, with an ecosystem. So you’ve been around this world of partnering for quite some time working with, we talked about Microsoft and all the major hyperscalers all the major software publishers, what do you believe in this world of partnerships? What do you see from the best partnerships that you work with? Dee Burger 21:44 I think it starts with, there’s a real reason for the partnership, being a partner for the sake of being a partner. It’s not like, it’s not it’s not like being friends in middle school. You know, if you think about it, there’s a real reason, our business reason and the end, the partners business reason need to intersect in a way that we know how we drive value for each other. And we’re honest about that relationship. We’re honest about how it works, because I think you can do you can do an awful lot from that vantage point. I think the other one is, there’s a lot of partnerships that are rooted in corporate relationships, which is necessary, but nothing actually matters, unless there’s a field relationship. And so it’s that balance of, are we aligned strategically? Do we understand what we’re trying to do? Are We Connected in the right way? But can the folks that are actually dealing with a particular client or client situation? Can they get aligned? Can they work to take the aspects of the partnership that we thought about in a strategic way, and make it practical and tangible to a customer? I think that’s where an awful lot of partnerships struggle, is that it is it is hard to be able to run it on two separate levels, it’s two separate sets of people. It’s two separate incentives. And frequently, it’s two sets of discussions. Vince Menzione 23:00 So what do you see from the best of the best there in terms of getting that level of alignment from the corporate conversation down to the field organization? Dee Burger 23:07 I think it’s I honestly think it’s a it’s a focus question. So if if we go again, 2000 sales executives, 6500 partners, if we say, hey, hey, team, let’s focus on our 6500 partners get going, they have no idea what to do with that, right, and you’re leaving it to chaos. And so we work to be very targeted around which partners in which markets for what reason a lot of the architect community I talk to you about earlier, that architect community is that translation. Ultimately, we’ve got to be with our clients, giving them the very best we know about how to make their fortunes better. At the end of the day, that’s our reason to exist. That’s why our business is here. And being able to do so means that you’re able to focus a message a lot better with with who you’re working with, and what areas and you know why. And I think that translation gets gets down very well to a sales team. I think it’s when they’re left to their own devices. And your partner with partner a over here, Partner B over here and Partner C over here, and it just happens to be who took who out to lunch last? It’s it can’t be left purely to randomness. Vince Menzione 24:13 So what I think I heard you say here is you’re relying Yeah, you have overlay resources that are supporting the organization from a solution perspective, right, their solution specialties. And when there’s a need from a client, you’re pulling in the right resources, the right partners to to address that customer’s needs. Dee Burger 24:29 Absolutely. Right. And we know in advance the why to it. Vince Menzione 24:32 Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So conversely, when you’ve seen partnerships fail, what would you say to them now? Like what what was the kryptonite that got in the way of a successful engagement? Dee Burger 24:44 I think a lot of it is adaptability. So there’s a strategic partnership that gets set. Let’s, let’s say, as we sit here in April of 2023, that somebody in January 2022 decided, hey, what’s the partnership going? Let’s go on this area. And the world is adapted a bunch, and the team is still in the old mode. Without having really thought about how the market is so dynamic. The partnerships also have to remain dynamic. The relationships have to be to be fostered, certainly at both those tiers, but the whole discussion about why we have the partnership, what we’re trying to do for customers, how it actually flows with the latest and greatest developments, I think that the key there is to be very dynamic, keeping that purpose in mind and keeping the two tiers the relationship in mind. Vince Menzione 25:33 Yeah, good. Points. Cindy. President inside North America, it’s a big deal. I mean, you’re a publicly traded company, a big organization, very well respected in our industry. What got you to this point? Like, was there a pivot? Was there something a spark that happened to get you on the right track that got you on the track of success, both at Capgemini. And now here, Dee Burger 25:56 I think I think the most important, I go all the way back to the beginning of my career. So I started with Gemini consulting, I was 22. And I went to my onboarding class, and everybody else was 30. And it was a unique situation, where if, if you designed an org chart, it was literally a diamond, there’s Zeos single point up here, a bunch of people doing a whole bunch of stuff, single point of the bottom, right here. Um, I was a research associate, I was hired, be I knew somebody Gemini consulting, they gave me a chance. And fairly quickly, I got put in a position where I was managing, and I started off attempting to manage the work really well, without an understanding that what you’re really managing is people. Yeah. And I think the key to to, if I look at my career, the thing that has helped me the most is an understanding of leverage, you know, if I, as an individual can make myself 50%, better, great. If I could make 10 People 10% better, that’s twice as good. If I can make 100 People 5% better, that’s another two and a half times as good as that. Right? So the idea of a recognition, particularly you take a company against a big company, right? If we can make if we can do small things and provide the right context and the right framework and the right, morale, boost assistance, whatever, to make 12,000 People marginally more effective. It’s better than anything else I could ever do that day, you know, and I think I’ve had a lot of experience the time over time running large organizations that but I think that principle is the key. And I think that what, what allows a success in a large organization, Vince Menzione 27:32 focusing on their on your people. So it’s such an important lesson for all of us, right? Like you said, managing Dee Burger 27:38 to help and not manage, yeah, help. Managing is one thing, right, coming up with a better idea for how they might do their job. That’s one thing. But to actually help, really is far, far more valuable. Vince Menzione 27:49 I love what you have to say there. So we’re gonna have a little bit of fun. This is like one of my favorite questions I get to ask are our most amazing guests and you are hosting a dinner party dinner party could be anywhere. It could be a beautiful Kiwi Island, it could be in Tempe, Arizona, any of these locations would be fantastic. But you can invite any three guests from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Who would you invite, and why? Dee Burger 28:16 So I’m gonna give you an answer to this guarantee you’ve never had before. And we’ll never have again, my three. The first one the easy one with my background. So I went to Clemson so it invite Clemson’s head coach football Dabo Sweeney, unbelievable guy, I’ve got a watch him a bunch. Watch his philosophy. He’s been a extraordinary success at Clemson. Interesting personal history, all the stuff he’s ever come the positive attitude, the leadership, a lot of that actually met him. I mean, interesting enough. So I met Dabo walking around on the streets of New York City. I’m Joe Blow. I run into Dabo. I was left with a colleague, we’re going out to meeting at 50th and fifth in New York City. We were just grabbing lunch had to be back. I ran into Deborah walk on the street, had a chat with him. The conversation ended with Coach Sweeney. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. We’ve got to get back to our meeting. He sat there and talked to us for 20 minutes on the street didn’t know me from Adam. But as nicer guys, you ever see vegan in the conversation, his enthusiasm for what he was building was so obvious, and it’s a big part of why he was successful. So Deborah’s got the first seat. The second one would be a guy named Tim urban. Tim urban started a blog called Wait, but why I found him I was doing a role at Capgemini where I was responsible for our global digital business. So part of it was how do you organize 30,000 people doing work with data and cloud and everything else and pulling that together? Part of it was What does digital mean to the future of our business? And so in that I read everything I could trying to educate myself on I ran across Tim urban with an incredibly interesting take on how AI was going to evolve. Given how they would go Elon Musk, strangely enough, also found Tim urban thought he was so interesting. He invited him out to spend two or three days following him around. Teach him about neuro link and all the different things going on. So at Tim urban next to Dabo, and Tim urban, and the third one would be iron Rand. Yes. Who wrote Atlas Shrugged and the fountainhead she’s probably been gone for 50 years now. But I’ve read Atlas Shrugged about 10 times. And I think when you’re when you’re thinking about clarity around the purpose of what you’re doing, truly being valuable sorting out sorting out all the puffery that goes on in the world from from actual progress. I’ve always I’ve always loved that book. And I’ve used it as a way to center myself. So it’d be a very odd discussion at the dinner party. I’d have a great time. I’m not sure what the others would think of each other. But I would certainly have a great time in such an environment. Vince Menzione 30:52 I think it’d be a great party, I might want to come Come join you. I’ve also read Atlas Shrugged and the fountainhead so I was a fan back in the day, I know you’re reminding me I need to go back to those lessons. There’s some really great lessons in our books. So Dee Burger 31:07 they’re, they’re great books. I mean, the only issue with them at all is I think, Atlas Shrugged is about 1100 pages. So it’s not for the faint of heart. Vince Menzione 31:17 I had a president of the company I worked for many, many years ago, who recommend the book, I purchased the book and it sat on my bookshelf for probably a year and a half before I finally cracked it open. Yeah, it took I think it might have been a summer project to read that book. Dee Burger 31:32 He has better in the Kindle version. You don’t want to take the physical one on airplane, because it’s all you’re gonna take. You almost have to check it. Vince Menzione 31:38 Yeah, it’s pretty thick. says this has been great day, I really enjoyed this conversation, getting to know you a little bit better here and welcoming you to our guests, any words of advice for our listeners, many of which are in this partner world, many of which partner with your organization on optimizing for their success throughout the rest of 2023? Well, Dee Burger 31:59 I mean, go back to what I said before the world is resetting the world is resetting from a crazy, crazy shock. And I believe that right now, we’re in a volatile world winners and losers separate from each other, right? In a world where everything’s great. Everybody wins. Mediocre companies can do really well. I had a guy say before he described it as in a hurricane, even turkeys fly. But when the wind stops, gets who hits the ground first. We’re in a period where the wind has stopped. And it is a time for companies to differentiate. I’m really happy with where insight is and how we’re going to compete in that market and how we’re going to invest in our growth during a turbulent time. And I hope everybody else thinks the same way. Vince Menzione 32:42 Right? Well, I’m rooting for your success as well and 2023. I love the progress you and the organization have made. Joyce has been doing an amazing job. I knew Joyce from her days at Dell when I was on the Microsoft side of that equation. So rooting for your success. excited to have you on board today. And thank you for joining our listeners. Dee Burger 33:02 Thank you, Vince. I really enjoyed it. Vince Menzione 33:03 Thank you. So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it. We all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail. And that ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft, and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. Announcer 33:56 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner. We’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering

Dec 11, 2023 • 46min

Holiday Encore – How do you leverage the massive $200 Billion opportunity in Cloud GTM?

The CEO of Tackle Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Bringing you some of the top episodes of the year for this end-of-year round-up. Are you ready to learn to leverage the massive $200 billion cloud opportunity in Cloud GTM working with leading providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google? Are you interested in learning how to leverage the power of marketplaces to grow your business and reach new customers effectively? Are you dealing with the economic headwinds we’ve all seen this last year? And if you want to hear from an expert, the CEO of a leading company driving effective, go-to-market strategies with the leading cloud providers, you’re in the right place. John Jahnke is the CEO of Tackle, a company specializing in helping SaaS (Software as a Service) companies accelerate their Cloud Go-to-market strategies. He joins to share how you and your organization need to take advantage of this massive opportunity we’re all seeing around marketplaces and hyper-scalar co-selling. If you’re ready to accelerate your success, you’ll enjoy listening to this insightful interview with this fantastic leader. In Tackle’s words John Jahnke was an early investor and advisor in Tackle and now serves as the CEO. John has spent the last 20 years in executive leadership roles with B2B technology companies like Pivotal, Greenplum, EMC, and Cognizant. John is passionate about remote work and helping software companies with their go-to-market strategy. He leads Tackle from Buffalo, NY where he lives with his wife and 3 children. John is an active member of the Forbes Technology Council. What You’ll Learn Tackle’s Mission2:49 How Tackle started in 2016 with the idea that the clouds would change how software was sold. Tackle is investing ahead of the curve. The economic headwinds since covid-19. Cloud go-to-market is becoming part of the sales tech stack. The Genesis of Cloud GTM8:40 How the organization is aligned and how it needs to align today. $755 billion of B2B software The early days of cloud go-to-market. How much revenue cloud will grow by in 2025. The opportunity for acceleration in the cloud marketplaces.13:10 Acceleration in the cloud go to market. Crossing the chasm between early and mainstream adoption. The proof is there. How to get people on board with driving cloud Why it starts with a strategy.18:15 Advice to large organizations looking to go to market. The importance of having a partner-led mindset. How to get an alignment at the c-suite level. The two spots to start when launching cloud go-to-market. Steps to successful cloud go-to-market strategy.24:03 Selling and maintaining customers is the most expensive part of every software company. Five Steps to successful cloud go-to-market The Five Steps to Consider?25:56 The five steps to take to get to cloud go to market. Success patterns at scale. Success patterns start with the end in mind. Selling today is harder than it has been. What John is seeing from the “big three”?31:42 Predictions for the coming months for the big three. The coming together marketplace. Innovation from a business model and marketplace standpoint. The evolution of enterprise agreements. His Career Journey to CEO of Tackle?35:59 How Dylan got started in the startup world. How Dylan and his co-founders met. Timing is tricky. Two distinct answers to the go-to-market question. His Ultimate Dinner Party?41:10 Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Robert Cialdini. The seven principles of influence. People want to work with people. Calls to action for the ISV community. Other Tackle Leaders Featured on Ultimate Guide to Partnering https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/166-partners-optimize-for-success-to-get-more-from-erin-figer-replay/ https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/116-helping-isvs-accelerate-meaningful-revenue-with-the-cloud-providers-through-marketplaces/ Why Ultimate Partner? Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth. Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® -, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success. In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead. Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?” If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise. Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS cloud, market, company, people, journey, marketplace, channel, isvs, organization, revenue, strategy, product, buyers, talk, cfo, cosell, part, customers, partner, years SPEAKERS Vince Menzione, Announcer, John Jahnke Vince Menzione 00:00 Are you ready to tap into the $200 billion cloud opportunity? Working with the leading providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google? Are you interested in learning how to leverage the power of marketplaces to effectively grow your business and reach new customers? Are you dealing with the economic headwinds we’ve all been seeing this last year? And would you like to hear from an expert, the CEO of a leading company driving effective, go to market strategies with the leading cloud providers, then you’re in the right place. Announcer 00:38 This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione. Vince Menzione 00:57 Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to bartering. 01:01 I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And today I will John Young Vince Menzione 01:06 geek, the CEO of tackle a company that specializes in helping software as a service companies accelerate their cloud go to market strategies. And he joins to share how you and your organization need to take advantage of this massive opportunity we’re all seeing around marketplaces, and hyper scalar. CO selling. If you’re ready to accelerate your success, then you’ll enjoy listening to this insightful interview with this amazing leader. Thank you for joining the ultimate guide to partnering. Today, I’m excited to announce ultimate partners first live digital event winning the ecosystem taking place on July 20. We’re all be joined by Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to cloud go to market and ecosystem led growth. This will be a companion event to the Microsoft inspire conference where you will learn how to achieve your greatest results in 2024. Please follow the link in our show notes to sign up for this exciting event. Thank you for joining us. John, welcome to the podcast. John Jahnke 02:17 Thanks for having me, Vince Great to be here. Vince Menzione 02:19 I am so excited to finally welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering we’ve been trying to do this for quite some time. You’re the CEO of tackle a company that specializes in the SAS and ISV. Space, accelerating cloud go to market strategies. So welcome. Thanks. So I did Jack, you know, we had the opportunity to finally meet in real life. And you know, I know quite a few of your team. I’ve had your chief cloud officer Sonjay as one of my earlier guests. But for our listeners that may have missed that episode, can you tell us a little bit more about tackle. John Jahnke 02:54 So tackle we actually got started in 2016, and co founder and CTO Dylan had the idea that the clouds would change the way that software was sold. And he was part of one of the cloud providers beta programs for marketplace. This is hard. And in general no one wants to build software to sell software. There’s there’s a repeatable product here. And you know, we raised a seed round with that hypothesis and started to invest and found pretty early success helping make it a business decision to launch cloud go to market instead of a product and engineering challenge. And we were able to work with some really interesting ISVs who who saw the future as well. And we’re investing ahead of the curve because back then it was not as clear what was happening with this movement as it may be it is today. New Relic was our very first customer. And I remember the conversation where they’re like at half of what you say is true we’re in because we’ve been struggling with this. And we really think there’s something great here for our business. And we were born on AWS, but our customers really, it was clear to them. They’re like, hey, we want to meet our buyers where they want to buy. And that’s across the hyper scalars. And this movement is happening across the hyper scalars. And we want a partner who can help us go on that journey. So that led to a phase of innovation to expand in cloud go to market across the hyperscalers. And then, you know, really marketplace was where we started. But that’s kind of the last mile. It’s like the execution of a transaction. And a lot of our customers would say, Well, I really want to better understand how to align cloud go to market with my pipeline. How could we accomplish that this cosell thing is really interesting to us. We think there’s magic to unlock and to sell. But the process is still very human centric, like how could we take that platform style thinking all the way through and that’s where we expanded our capabilities that allow an ISV to analyze their pipeline and make decisions about which of their customers whether their new customers or renewal customers could go on a cloud go to market journey we make that process of partnering with the clouds from a coastal standpoint really seamless, make executing a marketplace a business problem. And we allow you to do that at Super scale. And then the last thing we’ve seen happen, a lot of companies who maybe weren’t ready for it come to the table and say, okay, like the proof is there, how can we do this for all of our products? So it’s a really fascinating time in cloud go to market. Vince Menzione 05:22 Yeah, it is fascinating. In fact, I had been working with an organization that’s just at that point, right now they’re finally jumping in the water, so to speak, and they’ve been holding back, they’ve been resisting. And it’s funny, I think back to 2016, like, marketplaces, were really not a thing yet. CO selling was at its early days, I was still at the Microsoft side of that equation, and then moved over as a channel cheap. And we were still struggling to get some organizations to understand the value of the whole co selling methodology, why that was important, and why you needed to invest resources in that. So it seems like you got to it early. And then we’ve been talking about these last, well, I’ll call it the economic headwinds we’ve seen since COVID. We’ve seen most recently layoffs and what’s happening in the SAS economy. And then marketplaces, this whole notion around marketplaces being more of a thing. So you’ve coined this term cloud go to market. But can you tell us what it is? And perhaps for our listeners, what it isn’t? John Jahnke 06:21 Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s funny, we’re always trying to figure out how do we meet our customers where they are on their journey, because go to market in general, is really complicated, and is only getting more complicated. And I think cloud Gouda market is becoming part of that story. But if you rewind a few years, the way people thought about go to market 10 years ago, it was maybe direct and channel, they have their two options for sales. And then you saw, like marketing become a real integral part of go to market as people started to think about their top of funnel differently, and how do I better instrument sales and marketing system together? And then you layer in product lead growth, and everybody was thinking about, Well, how could I make it easier to land, or get people into our product sooner, so they could think about how to get value without ever actually having a formal relationship with us yet. And then you layer cloud into that as a way to complement all of those motions. So we’re on this journey where we think cloud go to market will become a default part of everyone’s sales tech stack. And they’ll be all of these different tools available to companies as they’re being born, to think about how they scale their go to market systems. And I think we’re seeing this shift where companies today are being born, more cloud go to market needed, where they’re saying, hey, as I’m building, as I’m building my go to market system, I want to be able to align where my buyers operate, which most likely is in the clouds. And I want to be able to capitalize on the budget that the cloud providers have in order to make it easier for someone to get started with us. And I think that’s an interesting part of cloud go to market for new companies. But for all these other companies who have all these different layers of glue, go to market clouds a complement to them. And it’s a way to either give your sellers more way to win, give your sellers access to a budget that didn’t exist before, which in this current economic time is a really powerful thing. Give your buyers access to solutions they need faster in order to solve problems. Vince Menzione 08:40 Well, you bring up an interesting point as you went through that journey, this both the buyers journey and the SAS or ISP vendors journey. And one of the things that strikes me is you look at the hyperscalers, the three hyperscalers, primarily here, and then you look at some of the ISV companies that are moving to SAS, right, not the born in the cloud talked about the board and the cloud ones, we talked about those cloud natives. But those organizations through the model, where I’ve got a channel, I’ve established a business process around the channel, I talk about how the organization is aligned and how it needs to align differently today, because generally the channel is like bolted on to the sales organization. It’s not integrated. And what I think I hear you talking about too, is this integration component, like how do we get as an organization more effective at co selling, not only with our hyper scalar vendors, but with our channel, even within our own organization, driving the resources that are directly touching the customer, with the alliances and partner facing parts of those organizations? Do you agree there? John Jahnke 09:40 Yeah, I think especially in companies of that vintage, who were maybe born in an era where the capabilities go to market work as significant or robust. Aligning cloud as an option for them to sell in new and modern ways is where we see the benefit happening. And it’s not just the go to market side, these companies are thinking like the nature of the way their buyers using products is changing. Now, these products may have been on prem at one point, they may not have been operating in a SAS or a SAS hybrid style. And so their products are going on a journey, how their customers run are going on a journey, which means go to market has to go on a journey with them. And I was thinking about this from what’s the macro level, who’s met, that’s underway. And you know, there’s this $755 billion of b2b software duckets. And some percentage of that is migrating to the clouds. And is that 1%? Is that 10%? Is that 50%? I think we’re still in the early days, you know, Canalis talks about how, by 2025, they think it’ll be $45 billion, go through it. You know, today, we estimate it right around 15 billion, those numbers are growing about 100% year over year. But if you said 15,000,000,755, it works out to roughly 2%. Today, yeah. And a lot of times when we talk to these more traditional organizations, they’re in the earliest days and the first transaction like changing the way you sell, it’s just like any new channel, when you when you turn the channel on getting your first win is the hardest one. But that helps you build the pattern for repeatability. And a lot of those companies have seen they’ve either done their first win, or they’ve had buyer demand in this new way. And they’re like, how do we capture that? And then how do we go on a journey to what percentage of revenue makes sense to us? And then we do this Data Cloud Marketplace research every year. And this is one of the questions we asked were like, first ISVs? What percentage of revenue Do you think cloud go to market will make up in your organization’s here? And the most common answer was 10%. This year. And when we first saw the data, we’re like, is that a lot? Like? How do I think about that, and when you boil it down here, like a $10 million error, or company having a million dollar channel, it’s probably their first meaningful channel, right? $100 million company having a $10 million channel, it’s likely their fastest growing channel, a billion dollar company having $100 million channel, it’s probably the largest channel in the world, globally scalable, powered by one of the fastest growing budget line items and enterprise technology. So that that story of where people are at in their journey, and even what they think that destination wants to be I love to have that conversation with more mature ISVs to be like, what does good look like to you? Is this the ability to capture a deal or a couple of deals? That’s one thing this is you want to get to 10% of revenue? I mean, this is literally a revenue transformation. Vince Menzione 12:43 I want to hone in on that Canalis study the 2025 study, right? So for 15 million, I think is the number you use 15 billion John Jahnke 12:53 to a 45. By 2025. Our data actually said 50 by 2025. But we’re in the ballpark today, like we’re both in both feels like Vince Menzione 13:01 a pretty aggressive number to achieve in two years. Do you think those stats are accurate? I mean, you said 50, they said 45? Do you feel confident about those stats? John Jahnke 13:10 I do. I actually think like this is where the current economic climate could we could see acceleration. And I think there’s the opportunity for acceleration for two distinct reasons. One, the durability of the cloud budget during this time of economic instability is really powerful, which I think will drive an acceleration for ISVs, to think about selling the other clouds. And the second is the movement that’s happening channel. And how there has been so much focus from all the cloud providers around this first wave of cloud go to market has proven the second wave is coming. And the second way really does think about how do you align an ISV and our channel partner together to be able to meet the buyer, the way they need to be met with appropriate combination of product and services in order to solve their business now, so I think channel is a turbocharger for this cloud, go to market movement. So those are the two things that cause me to believe, like this actually becomes a gravitational force around this. And the bigger it gets, the more it could excel. Yeah, yeah. Vince Menzione 14:22 I think you’re right on with that, by the way. And I’ve been in the room with the channel partners and the ISPs having these conversations. And really, the blockers right now have been things like compensation for sales reps, compensation at the channel side, right? top line revenue or versus bottom line. And how do we make it whole for everybody? How do we make this achievable? And a win win win across the organizations? I come back to this a little bit here because it feels like a momentum around marketplaces. We could all feel it right now. Right? We were in the room a couple of weeks ago with a with a host of ISVs and one of the hyperscalers is Seeing it across what are some of the other hyperscalers? You doing? Microsoft has a big event coming up soon here. I’m certain there’s going to be some announcements where marketplace will take center stage. So where are we in the lifecycle? I think about Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, and like one of my favorites, and probably one of their classic books on technology adoption lifecycle. Have we crossed? Are we crossing? Like, are we mainstream yet? And where are we in terms of getting those later adopters? And laggards onboard? What do you think about that, John? John Jahnke 15:30 Yeah, I think we’ve crossed the chasm. And I think we’re in like, using Geoffrey Moore’s actually, I think we’re in that early majority phase where you see the upslope of the curve, which ties to the growth rates that we’re talking about. And the thing that changes from the early adopters are the pioneers, the visionaries, they see things before, there’s real proof, and they’re willing to make a bet. And that was the people who embarked on this journey back in 2018 2019 2020. Today, the proof is there, there’s so much proof where the mainstream is saying, Okay, there’s clearly something here is this 50% of my revenue, like some of these Borg cloud, go to market needed companies, maybe not, but it’s definitely not zero. When you talk to some of those companies, and you have that percentage of revenue conversation, they’re not talking about $10 million, or $100 million, a percent of revenue is hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which I think is further fuel to those projections, because I had this conversation with someone recently, where they’re like, well, is the cloud, who owns the cloud budget? And how why would that work? Like why would that make sense? Isn’t this owned by like it, or the engineers are? Like, no, actually, Cloud has gone on this journey were in 2018, the cloud budget was probably a departmental budget line item, it was owned, either by like infrastructure, or application engineering, or development or product or whatever you would call it inside your company. And then as it got bigger, it started to move to be a CFO own budget line items where these oftentimes, especially as people are getting out of data centers and rebuilding platforms and products run in the cloud, the cloud becomes one of their top five budget line items. And that’s when the CFO and procurements engaged in thinking about how do I optimize, like, even that shifting of the ownership of budget inside the buyer, I think is another factor outside of that large company transformation. Vince Menzione 17:32 I would agree there on the CFO side, it’s certainly a large line item, large budget line item. And I’ve seen firsthand the CFO negotiating directly with the hyper scalar leadership team, on those numbers, the whole notion of the durable cloud budgets, I feel like you’ve brought that really to light, I don’t think a couple of years ago, maybe it is because of your focus, and the research of your study. It really helped bring that crystallize that for a lot of these organizations that are there on that journey. What about the ones that aren’t there yet? Like what would you say to them now? Like how would you get them on board with driving this? Obviously, the ones that are resisting the most whether it be channel strategy, whether it just be laggard, mentality mindset within the organization? What do you say to those organizations? Yeah, John Jahnke 18:18 I actually, this is an area where thinking about just tackle and the journey we’ve gone on as a company, we’re a SaaS company, we built a platform. And that’s the way we thought about the world. How could we help people use our platform in order to go on the street. But as we’ve shifted in the technology, Adoption Lifecycle curve to this more mature company approach, we’ve actually had to evolve our approach because companies like that, they don’t want to start with products, they actually want to start with strategy. And that strategy, oftentimes looks at the executive team, where there’s some education about what’s happening in the market. There’s some storytelling about customers who’ve had success and what powered that success. And then there’s execution, like, how can they get started? Because in in these larger organizations, oftentimes, it’s not a single product discussion. It’s a portfolio of products. And they often have a huge range of buying centers, then I think the best way to start is to focus like choose the spot that makes the most sense to initiate this journey. And you don’t have to go all in you don’t have to say day one, I’m going to get to 10% of revenue, you can say that’s, that’s part of the possible, but how do we go do a real experiment and see how this fits into the system? And I think one of the things we’ve seen over the last three years with large companies is oftentimes they get ground up in their own like, internal discussion, like how is if I launch a cloud, go to market strategy, how is my existing channel going to think exactly? Well, that’s an at scale problem, like, we can self contained that to a spot we’re This is an experiment, our buyers want us to meet them where they want to buy, this is a proven place, we have to experiment and understand how it fits in. And we’re not changing our whole business strategy, we’re doing a go to market experiment. And so back to how do we advise people who are stuck at that spot, we oftentimes will reverse the order and say, let’s start with the executive team. And let’s actually go through that education and enablement process to define what the right strategy is. Because you go too big, too fast, you’re probably going to spend too much money and too much time and not actually have success. And what you really want is the tailwind of revenue and deal acceleration to drive your transformation, not some big picture, press release, and launch that doesn’t actually turn into value for your buyers and sellers. Vince Menzione 20:50 I’m glad you brought up the C suite or the executive team, because I always talk about this lack of a partner lead mindset and a lot of these organizations, right? Some of these companies that SAS in particular, just a few years ago, the CROs primarily came from a direct selling motion, you didn’t need a channel to sell SAP. And then you’ve got this, I called it the appendage of the channel that’s bolted on to the organization and might be under the CRO it might be in a different pocket. Generally, it’s buried someplace. And it’s owned by a channel chief. And some of these channel chiefs had been around for 30 years. They came from the old. I call it the Boca Raton model, right when IBM launched the PC and the channel got created that whole movement there. And then you got the CFO sitting in the middle saying why am I spending more money on an alliance strategy? I’m giving up revenue here on partners on channels. Oh, I’ve got to pay marketplace fees? How do you think through? Is there a pat answer you have on how you get the alignment at the C suite? John Jahnke 21:47 Yeah, it’s a great, it’s such a great question. And we haven’t seen like the silver bullet answer here. It ends up being who inside the organization sees the vision, and how to help them go on a journey to bring alignment across the stakeholder gaps. And I’ve had a few conversations with ISVs lately that highlight this, I was talking to a how to channel medium size ISV earlier this week, and they’re like, hey, in this economic downturn, if we can’t tie our impact directly to top a funnel and revenue, people are going to ask questions about why we’re here, right? Like this is the era of productivity. And I think being able to think about it not just from US Strategic what’s our strategy from a partner standpoint, but it’s strategy and execution, which brings that partner leader in the Alliance building the revenue leader directly together? So I think those are traditionally the two spots we’ve started, if we’re talking about launching cloud, go to market, who in the revenue team is on your side, to bring this to life? But what does good look like? And if you don’t have that stakeholder day one, you need to figure out how to get that stakeholder to the table with you to launch and sell. Yeah, okay, we’re in the era of productivity, what value do I get out of the costs in our go to market Cisco? And where do we want to invest more? And where do we need to think about investing less, and there’s complexity here with channel like the cost of channel layered into the cost of selling, but we’re seeing CFOs emerge in those conversations in ways that they weren’t. I’ve seen this happen, where CEOs have a strong desire to evolve their company towards cloud. And they’re disconnected from an execution standpoint, and they actually really want to be able to bring the team together to get to like, how do we go do something together. And we’ve seen that in some of the largest ors in the world, so it’s mostly figuring out who has the vision and how to connect the dots to success, and then use that success to help them drive that broader engagement. Vince Menzione 23:47 You know, you mentioned peeling back on that client acquisition costs, like if you could get into the numbers that an organization is spending all up on their go to market and their client acquisition costs. And you can say, this is what it’s like in the model today. And this is what it would look like in the future. I think you’ve got a brilliant John Jahnke 24:04 analysis, there. Still, it’s selling and maintaining your customers is the most expensive part of every software company, and really has yet to be optimized. And we’re not simplifying the problem. We’re making the problem more complicated. So costs are going up in some ways. And I do believe deeply the order with which this happens, we’ll change company by company based upon their product strategy, but every company will have direct sales, every company will have channels, every company will have product lead, and every company will have cloud and those four things will enter their go to market system at different times based upon age of the company, the type of product that they have, and how they think about prioritizing. Vince Menzione 24:45 good segue here. I got to listen in on your big event. You talked about five steps to successful cloud go to market during that session. Could you take our listeners through what those As five elements were sure, John Jahnke 25:01 I think when we think about cloud go to market, it starts with strategy. And really your strategy ties to a lot of this executive alignment conversation we’ve been having. But it’s also about your product strategy with the clouds. It’s about your go to market strategy will pick clouds, and then how you’re aligning resources and resources or a combination of people and technology in order to set your destination. And I think about a product person A grew up a go to market person became a product person over time and inside a product you’re constantly iterating are constantly experimenting, you’re constantly seeking to learn from your users. And I think that’s a era we’re in and go to market. We’re in this rapid experimentation era, but you need a strategy. So the second part of that becomes how do you power your strategy with data. And we think very much in like, the outcome that matters to our customers is selling, they want to sell more, they want to sell faster, they want to sell more efficiently. In order to determine the opportunities to go on this journey, you have to start with data and be able to analyze your existing pipeline and your existing customers to make decision about who you can deliver more value to with Cloud gemondo. The third part is around your pipeline for cloud, which really centers around taking the intelligence you get from analyzing your existing customers and existing pipeline, distilling that down to where their focus and then leveraging this magic of cosell, in order to start to accelerate that pipeline. So the third phase is all about connecting with cosell in order to improve the quality of your cloud pipeline over time, the fourth phase is all around marketplace, and really being able to take that pipeline and turn it into revenue in a fast and efficient way. And this is where you get to tap into the cloud budgets, you get to tap into all of the benefits, clouds are investing in order to bring this movement to life. And then the last piece is all around scale. Because doing one deal looks very different than doing 10 looks very different than doing 100 looks very different than being 1000. And this is a multi year evolution, your first deal will be the hardest deal. And they will only get easier from there. But they will create different pain. As you go on that journey, we’ve helped customers go on that entire journey from single transaction to 1000s of transactions. And those who take a long term view are the ones who acknowledge that, okay, we know we’re going to wrap more resources around this in the early days to learn to build the patterns of the future. And then we’re going to take those patterns and teach our organization how to change with success. So those are the five steps that we think about when you go on Vince Menzione 28:00 this journey. It’s a lot of organizational change in there creating the operational excellence as well to drive that new initiative. And that new model for the organization that use put a stake in the ground with the strategy. John Jahnke 28:10 Yeah, and this is where, four years ago, there were a lot of unknowns today. Honestly, there are success patterns, at scale, across ISVs of all shapes and sizes, from seed stage, startups being board and cloud go to market needed to growth companies who are investing much more in their go to market and are trying to think about which investments to layer and when to add scale sellers who are selling 10, or 10s of percentage points of revenue to the largest software companies in the world, mostly, are doing this big revenue transformation. There are success patterns across an entire ecosystem. Vince Menzione 28:50 So that brings up a good point. So what do you see from the best of the best here and the success patterns, John Jahnke 28:55 starting with the end in mind, like this is a strategic layer to your go to market system. So I think people who win, think about this in a long term way, and then work their way back to what are the steps we take to get to the destination that we want to be. If you are thinking about cloud, go to market for one deal, that can be success, it’s not going to be durable success, it’s not going to become an integrated part of your go to market. So I think the other part, going back to that first point around the like building your strategy, the ISVs who go fastest, have executive alignment, have product strategy alignment, have go to market alignment, and know that they’re going to invest in both people and technology to bring this to life. You can’t make this a side project you can’t like and I say that because so many people have done this as a side project that became their next career. So if you’re starting today, you want someone who’s going to own it and focus on it you want to Tigard To clearly identified who’s going to go execute on transactions, I think like that strategy part is a really key formula. And don’t try to do too much too fast. Oftentimes, we encourage people to start with one hyperscalers, start with one product start with one deal. And people are like, no, no, no, we know this is going to work. We want to launch in all three at the exact same time with all of our products. And really, you can’t, we just do not see that as the success pattern. This is an evolution, I spent a lot of time in the application transformation world like moving applications from on prem to cloud, and it all started with one, what’s the one, we’re gonna go change? And I think this revenue transformation all starts with, what’s the one deal? You’re gonna start with? And then go, I’m not sure, Vince Menzione 30:49 yeah, I love what you had to say, here, I was thinking about the ones that just do it as a side project, or do it that check the box with the hyperscale, or to say, yeah, we’ve got this marketplace, solution and market now, versus being all in and doing all the things you just discussed. I mean, as this is John Jahnke 31:06 not the easy button, like there is no magic button for revenue in a software company, especially at this time, if you’re gonna do it, you need to invest in bringing it to life, that’s no different than any other channel partner relationship. And even if you think about you hire a direct seller, and you don’t invest in helping them be successful, odds are, they’re not going to be successful. We all have to acknowledge the fact that selling today is harder than it’s ever been. And we need to lean in to make it successful. If you’re going to take it from a we’ll just throw it we’ll just hang a shingle and hopefully some more calls us on Czar’s animal. Vince Menzione 31:40 So let’s talk about the hyperscalers. For a moment here, we discuss them briefly earlier. But it seems to me that they’re at different stages in their maturity models as well, I suppose first out of the gate, the most advanced, Microsoft will probably this is just a hunch is going to put big investments when they do their 2020 for Microsoft Inspire. And we were both at the Google event a few weeks back, right where they laid out their plants. What are you seeing from the big three? What is your observation or predictions for the coming months, John Jahnke 32:12 this is working for all three, sellers are selling buyers are buying. And they’re all at slightly different points in their evolution. And they’re focused on different things. And they’re all going to continue to innovate, which I think will continue to make the domain more complex. And I think with that, the coming together marketplace and cosell has been really fascinating to see over the last couple years because I do think like how those who nail cosell when and when that scale, because it’s one thing to enable someone to list and launch in your marketplace, it’s another thing to be able to let them use your budget, in order to make it easier for their buyer to get access to your technology. It’s a whole nother thing to help them actually sell revenue is strategic to every software company, fast, efficient, productive, global, which I think is another super interesting spot. Because you think about building a go to market team in Grow SAS company, one of the hardest things to do is go global. It’s expensive. When you talk to people, a lot of times they’re not successful, or they take repeated iterations. It’s very channel rich, a lot of channels history there, which increases complexity, like other clouds can help with global, I think is a really interesting spot. So I think we’ll just see more, we’re going to see a lot more innovation, both from a business model standpoint, as well as a cosell plus marketplace standpoint. And a lot of times going back again, 2018. I remember having a conversation with a buyer who was talking about their enterprise agreement. And this is like the earliest days of this idea of drawdown. They’re like, Could I actually sell more to my customer, if I could convince them to use marketplace as part of the overall agreement. And that was like the earliest indications of Yeah, people are starting to understand this ecosystem effect at a cloud seller level could help them increase their share of wallet, as well as deliver a lot of value to the buyers like, hey, we have all these first party services, but we have all these third party services, put them together in a way that gets you your business outcome as fast and efficiently. Since then, there’s been like waves of these enterprise agreements that have gone through. We’re now it’s much more common to see that CFO think about okay, I got my cloud agreement. How do I complement those two together? Like that’s becoming more real, but we’re still really in that evolution because we talked about the dura ability of the cloud, those agreements oftentimes are durable or multi year in nature, right. And now we see that across all the hyper scalars, it’s a much, much more common pattern, the clouds, investing more in helping the buyers understand how to do this, I think helps the whole seller ghost, Vince Menzione 35:15 it talks to also the power of the hyper scalars to enter the C suite of those organizations and have those more relevant conversations than a startup SAS company would and having those budgets aligned. John Jahnke 35:28 And yeah, as a cloud seller, you have a better reason than ever to talk to the CFO, not maybe not only the CIO, or the head of infrastructure that had a product that the the CFO, the CEO, and now even the CRO, I just bought, how many salespeople actually got the attention of a CRO and software company? Vince Menzione 35:46 That’s right, not very many. So I’d like to pivot here. John, we talked a little bit about your career journey. But was there like a pivot or a spark that got you to become the CEO of this amazing organization? John Jahnke 35:59 Yeah, it’s a fun story. So maybe going way back, because there’s first that when do you decide you want to do this point in your career. And I remember I worked for EMC, I started my career as an SC actually was a customer prior to being an SE. Joe Tucci was our CEO. And I’m an SC and Buffalo, New York, like, and Joe’s doing some big oil company meeting. And he talked about how he started his career as an SAE, and then went on this journey to your product leader, and then went on the study to be a revenue leader, and then ultimately a CEO. I was 23 at the time, and I’m like, you know, that sounds pretty awesome. Like, I think I could do that. So there’s this like, distinct point where you’re like, because people always ask me, When did you decide you want to do that? And I remember that point as a point in time where I’m like, that sounds like a really interesting journey. And then you get to the, how do you come together around an idea, and not really starts with people. So I was at EMC, we acquired this company, green plum, I joined Greenplum. To help them scale. I was in like, field ran pre sales and professional services. I’m always a field person, always in emerging tech. And a couple people from Greenplum ended up on my team, Brian Denker. Until woods, my co founders, and they were super smart, super curious, like fun to be us. We did a lot of work together. And they like many startup people didn’t want to go on this big company journey. And I ended up going off and doing a couple other things. And we always stayed in touch. And those relationships. We had this synergy were When Dylan had the original idea, he came back and we came back together. And we talked about it. So there was that, like, I love the line from Hamilton, where they’re like you never know who will tell your story. You never know who you meet, who will become part of your story. And that’s been so true on the startup journey. So many people have helped us along the way and reached out and introduced us to a customer reached out and introduced us to an investor. Sometimes people you don’t talk to for years, and you’re like, wow, let’s just never know. So be a good human. Always try to maintain and develop those relationships, because who knows where they go. So that was the second part like us coming together. And then I originally was an investor in tackle. And I said to Dylan O’Brien, I’m like, I love what you’re doing. I love the space, I want to stay involved. I’ve never done a day zero company, smallest company I’ve ever worked for was 140 people. I know again, and we’d love that that’d be great. And Brian tells a story about how a lot of people say that when you’re starting a company and how few people actually show up. And we just started doing the work together. And it became really natural and got to the point where I was going to start a different company. Brian’s like, we’ve gotten to product market fit. You’ve been here since day one, why don’t you just join us full time and help us scale. And again, we kind of just grew together it was startups are very much about timing. There’s a lot of great people out there. But getting the timing right, like getting alignment. And then the timing right is really tricky. And having grown up in SE, thinking about N v and se in the year 2000 like.com Mania, I wasn’t in sales, but I was just observing the crazy behaviors and like this, this really bananas and being able to play a part in changing the way that software is sold, which is ultimately what I think we’re doing. And that was the thing guard early customers. They weren’t saying that, but that was the signal you were seeing and feeling. That’s the thing that even we didn’t fully understand it in those early days. And it’s just come to light in different ways over the years. And I think there’s so much we’re in the earliest days of this revenue transformation. We’re earliest days at his club go to market movement. So it’s a bit of a longer like, there’s a lot of twists and turns along the way. But that’s maybe like an arc of what that journey looks like. Vince Menzione 39:46 It strikes me as we think about beginning with the end in mind being that marketplace offer which I like to refer to as a non fungible token really becomes the objectification of bringing all those elements together and changing and Shifting this movement, if you will, shifting this go to market motion across internally within the organization and then across your ecosystem. Yep. So this is a fun question I like to ask just about every guest. John, I know you know about this question because we’ve had Sanjay on and Aaron on the podcast, but you are hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past, to this amazing party. You could even decide where you want to have this great party, whom would you invite? And why? John Jahnke 40:33 It’s funny when you ask this question. I thought about it a lot. And I actually have two answers. And there’s two distinct answers. And one, I live in Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised my whole family’s around me and my wife’s whole families around us are like, and that’s like, what we live for. And so my first answer would be my mother, my grandmother and my father in law, we’ve all passed on and being able to come together one more time would mean the world to me. So that’s like answer number one, the more business relevant answer, I think, you know, probably, so two of these are very famous people. And one is probably less known. So the first ones, Warren Buffett, I just think, like, such a fat, like such a fascinating story in so many ways, so much wisdom, so humble. And then one of his best friends is Bill Gates, who I also think like the learning arc on Bill Dietz from the journey at Microsoft to being a philanthropist and everything he’s done. So that’s really part two. And part three is somebody Robert Cialdini, who’s a professor at Harvard. And he wrote a book about influence, which I read when I was in grad school. And it’s one of the things that I think most about, just on this career journey of just trying to understand people and understand how they think and why is research really connected with me when I was in grad school, and he’s someone that I’ve always wanted to meet. So those are very cool for two sets of three. Vince Menzione 42:05 I think we could bring them all together, you know, just have them all the same. Where were you going to host this dinner party, John? John Jahnke 42:11 Well, it’s funny because I actually talked to my wife about this. And I’m like, because originally I was like my mom, Warren Buffett. And I’m like, my mom wouldn’t want to go let dinner and she’d be like, No, I actually want to spend time with you. And like, maybe bring your sisters like that would that would be Vince Menzione 42:25 good. Oh, so we’ve met. John Jahnke 42:29 Yeah, she’d be like, I don’t care about those other guys. Like, it’s so where would we host I mean, honestly, at home, in our backyard, at a table like good people, good food, good. times. I’m a pretty simple, pretty simple, but I love fine things. But at the end of the day, I’d rather a barbecue on good money over fancy food. Vince Menzione 42:50 And we’re talking about the weather getting nice now. So if you don’t mind, maybe I’ll bring a beverage and come along. I’ve only met one of those people, Bill Gates, and certainly only got to work with him for a short period of time. But Warren Buffett so irrelevant at his age, and do you know the book by Cellini? What is that title, and John Jahnke 43:08 it’s been republished, it’s a principles of influence, but there’s a lot, there’s a lot of different versions around it. And there’s like seven principles of influence and understanding, like how it really comes down to just like the way people react, and you see these principles and use and especially like, all forms of marketing, like scarcity is a principle of influence. So Taylor Swift tickets right now are the greatest example of scarcity applied, and she’s not really benefiting from that, but the system is benefiting from it. People do unusual things for things they perceive to be scarce, right, like understanding that changes the way you think about them. So it’s that, that those are the liking principles. And other one, like, people want to work with people, they like Linux, in general. And it’s funny, you see it all the time, if someone shows up in a way where they’re like, I don’t know, if I want to be around that person. That person doesn’t give me energy, like so. It’s a fascinating read. Vince Menzione 44:07 We’re gonna put a link to it in the show notes. I appreciate. Okay, so any last words, calls to action, if you will, for our listeners, many of which are in the ISV community, the independent software, vendor, community SAS community, about optimizing their success, and perhaps engaging with you and your organization. John Jahnke 44:25 I think, like tackle, we’ve evolved a lot as a company, and we continue to evolve on behalf of our 600 ISVs we support with and that number is growing every day. And I love when Nicolas, like almost call it a boomerang like someone we worked with at one point in time on our journey comes back around because they’re like, Hey, we actually, yeah, we worked together for a little bit. But now, with everything you’re doing, we want to work together a gap. And I think we’ve invested a lot in this idea of services on strategy. and being able to meet customers wherever they are on their journey, and even just to be able to share some expert advice. So that’s a common thing. Like, everybody knows they want to do more. And people aren’t exactly sure how they what the best practices are. And that’s the thing that in this next era, the evolution of tackle our continued growth, we want to be able to share those stories more. And those we try to like club go to market XP, we try to bring the voice of our customers forward is it’s their success that matters, right? But how we help people build their strategy for success. And I’d say, we’re here we’re here to help, like we live, to help sell or sell like, it’s the most fun thing. I’ve got to pee. I feel like I’ve gotten a PhD in the software industry go to market over the last seven years. And that’s been the greatest part of this technology. So we’re here to help. And I’d say, even if that’s just engaging and sharing what’s happening in the industry. Vince Menzione 46:00 Well, thank you so much, John, I was excited to have you as a guest today. I want to thank you for your time know how precious it is, as CEO of a fast moving organization, a rocket ship, if you will, in this space. So thank you for your time.

Nov 29, 2023 • 1h 13min

201 – Oracle Cloud Innovation: A Masterclass, with Ross Brown

Ross Brown Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Embark on a transformative journey with us, as we invite Oracle’s own Ross Brown to illuminate the trailblazing path Oracle Cloud is carving in the tech world. In this condensed power session, we strip down 30 years of partnership mastery to reveal the core of Oracle’s disruptive cloud strategies. Prepare to have the curtain lifted on Oracle’s cloud innovations that are challenging the status quo and setting new standards for security, efficiency, and partnership synergy. This is not just a conversation—it’s a masterclass in industry evolution with one of the greats. Tune in to redefine what you thought possible in cloud computing. About Ross Brown Ross Brown North American Ecosystem Lead, Oracle Cloud With a distinguished three-decade career in tech partnerships, Ross Brown now spearheads Oracle Cloud’s North American ecosystem, driving growth and innovation. His expertise, gained from leading roles at VMware and Microsoft, is pivotal to Oracle’s strategic collaborations and cloud solutions. Listen to Ultimate Guide to Partnering What You’ll Learn? Oracle Cloud’s rapid growth and partnerships.0:00 Rethinking cloud computing strategies.5:00 Cloud computing issues and solutions.10:00 Cloud security and network architecture.14:03 OCI’s unique features and benefits.18:01 Moving Oracle apps to cloud and partnering with GSI/regional SI.22:32 Oracle’s cloud strategy and partnerships.27:44 AG1 SponsorshipMessage 31:34 Solving industry problems with technology partnerships.32:57 Cloud computing, AI, and ego in the tech industry.36:08 Cloud computing and partnerships.42:06 Partnering with Microsoft for cloud services.45:11 AI adoption and partner ecosystems in tech industry.51:26 Partner recruitment and skill development in various industries.54:38 Career development and technology.57:23 Dinner party guests including business leaders and philanthropists.1:03:58 Entrepreneurship, business growth, and innovation.1:06:37 Celebrating Over 200 Episodes Ultimate Partner LIVE Ultimate Partner recently celebrated its inaugural event, an exceptional milestone met with extraordinary feedback. We achieved an impressive satisfaction score of 4.85 out of 5, and I’m thrilled to share that every attendee surveyed expressed their intention to join us for our next event. For those who couldn’t make it worry not! We’re excited to bring you a curated selection of outstanding content from our sessions, all conveniently accessible under one roof. To ensure you don’t miss out on these insights, I encourage you to visit the Ultimate Partner website and subscribe to our newsletter. Stay tuned – there’s a lot more to come from The Ultimate Partner, and we can’t wait to share it with you. Why Ultimate Partner? Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth. Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering®, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success. In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead. Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?” If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise. A Word from AG1 Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS cloud, build, oracle, oci, partner, run, customer, microsoft, company, business, people, talk, aws, ai, platform, solve, oracle cloud, network, put, big SPEAKERS Ross Brown, Announcer, Vince Menzione Vince Menzione 00:00 Are you curious about why Oracle Cloud is rapidly gaining ground against giants like AWS, Microsoft and Google? Have you ever wondered what goes into building a successful technology ecosystem? And want to hear from someone who’s done it multiple times? And are you interested in the recent groundbreaking collaboration between Oracle and Microsoft, and want to know why this is a game changer for the industry, then you’ve come to the right place. This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione. Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host, and today I will Ross Brandt leads North American ecosystems at Oracle Cloud. And if you’ve been following the tech space, you know that Oracle Cloud has become the fourth hyperscale, showing remarkable growth and innovation. Ross is at the forefront of this exciting journey. And today he’ll share his insights not just about Oracle Cloud, but about the evolving landscape of Technology Partnerships. This episode is a masterclass from one of the leaders in this ecosystem space. And I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Ross Brown. Ross Brown 01:34 Ross, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, fans. Glad to be here. I’m so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering you lead North America ecosystem for Oracle Cloud. And I’m so excited for this discussion today. Thanks Good to be here, really excited to have an opportunity to chat about how the cloud is evolving the channel and the channel is evolving the cloud, such a great topic for our listeners, and you and I had the opportunity to be at Microsoft at the same time. But for our listeners that may have been under a rock maybe for the last decade and a half, I was hoping you can introduce it. I was hoping you could introduce us to you and your role at or Sure. So I’ve been an Oracle for about three and a half years, you know, my job when I came in was part of the dev organization in the outbound Product Management Group. Because as we’ll talk about the way Oracle Cloud infrastructure was created was as a separate business isolated from the rest of Oracle. And that’s prevent cross contamination between trying to build a cloud of the future and the behaviors of store Oracle. So I was brought into the dev org. And then about 18 months in the dev org moved over to leading product marketing about six months into moving product marketing. And then once we got everything launched in sort of got a complete cloud out there. And we’re passing Google in terms of breadth of services, I’ve moved over to kind of my historic exec role, which is running partnerships for the cloud infrastructure side. Now, yeah, that’s been a lot of fun. coming into work, but and being the partner guy is a jarring experience. But it’s been great. Yeah, you know, you and I had a little bit of a discussion about Oracle and partner, right? We will get dive in a little bit there with your experiences, maybe from the outside with Oracle. So to give a little context of why we’re sort of joking about this, I spent 30 years in partner executive roles. Prior to Oracle, I led worldwide partners and alliances at VMware. And prior to that, when Vince and I worked together, I was responsible for Microsoft’s global partner strategy and led the Azure and Office 365 partner teams as well as the transition in our incentives programs at Microsoft from sort of license based to consumption based and trying to lead that transition towards clouds are built not bought. Prior to being at Microsoft, I was CEO of a security company in Southern California that discovered 30% Of all the flaws in Microsoft products, which was always an awkward part of coming into Microsoft. And then prior to that I was at a partner called a company called Citrix Systems out of Fort Lauderdale where I built the first deal registration program in the industry. And I worked at IBM and Tech Data, and I managed to reseller and migrate prior to that. So I’ve been in the industry for 30 years, always on the partner side. But now, in a cloud context, partnering is a very different context. So that’s kind of why I’ve come to Oracle, you know, let’s start with Oracle Cloud, right? And the work that’s going on there, there’s quite a bit of enthusiasm and growth, right? You’re being coined the fourth hyper scalar, our friend, Bob Evans, from acceleration economy is tracking the cloud wars and is really bullish on the work that Oracle is doing from a growth perspective. But you were laid out of the gate, and we talked about this, like when you came on board, it was just starting it up. Right. And, you know, Larry made some comments maybe a decade or so ago about the cloud and we can we can come back to, but why are you playing fast catch up now, to the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud. This is gonna take a minute to unpack but it’s a really good story. Alright, so if you go back to 2006, and I had hair back then it was fun. I had a little bit bigger back to 2006. AWS was just starting up as a way for then to monetize the massive spare compute cycles they had for their e commerce engine. And they you know, Microsoft quickly followed with red dog in 2008. It launched his Azure in really late 2009. And at that time, you really what was happening is you had, you know, Microsoft had built Global Foundation service that was running Xbox Live and being in office 365. And starting to run dynamics. And, you know, Google had built Googleplex, which was a scale out really massively horizontal cloud native environment for running things like MapReduce, and, you know, for search, and then YouTube and a bunch of other applications that are really very scale horizontal stuff. And then Microsoft, and Google sort of was following what AWS had done, which was find a way to monetize their spare compute. And if you think about that, that was an architecture that existed for one purpose, either ecommerce or YouTube or, but makes a horizontal cloud native type activities being turned into an engine that you could time slice and share with others and stuff like that, which is brilliant, right? It’s a really a profound breakthrough in sort of it strategies and stuff. But when we followed in sort of 2012, and started building a cloud, we just mirrored what everyone else was doing, including, by the way, IBM Cloud and K five from Fujitsu and everybody else, which was commodity computers, organized in racks with Hub and Spoke topology networks at the top and really clever software, running containers and server lists and things like that. But, you know, it suffered from two sins, like with two fatal flaws that we just realized one was, we weren’t building it on top of something that already had been paid for, we were having to actually pay for all these computers. So the economics were horrible, like, you’re never going to make that work against a Googleplex, who can monetize search at such a high margin, that the cloud basically is free from an infrastructure, it’s all just value add on top of it until you start specializing what you need. And so what that was number one capital sin, which was it was going to cost a ton of money to lose, right? That was sort of a good thing. And two, we couldn’t run our own stuff. Like our own environments, were struggling to run inside our cloud. And we can make Exadata run. It’s an engineered appliance. And you can certainly put that in the cloud fabric and make it run but running things like real app like the RAC our application clustering capabilities, that was really hard to do. It just wasn’t performing well. So it Larian 2014, sort of stepped back and started a skunkworks project, which I really liked. His approach to this was he, he’s been a fixture in our industry, and the Sydney is a pioneer, it’s so many things, to be self aware enough to step back and go, Hey, I want to do something new. But to do it new, I really have to do it new blank slate, like the tabula rasa approach of I can’t build on the strength I have, I have to build on just some assets like capital and things like that. So we hired Don Johnson, Clay McCormack, and pretty Vinson out of AWS here in Seattle, and gave them sort of a mandate with the mandate was, number one, go build a business and answer the question of knowing now as senior AWS architects 15 years or 10 years into the cloud, knowing what you know, now, what would you do different? Like if you could start all over with unlimited budget a blank piece of paper, and you weren’t building it as an environment that was on top of an E commerce something or weren’t building it the way GCP did on top of Google flex, but you could purpose build whatever you want it? How would you do different both technically and business wise? What would you change? And second, do it on your own, you have unlimited budget, but please, you build your own HR, build your own, you know, supply chain, build all that stuff, but don’t let Oracle influence or somehow constrain your thinking of here’s how Oracle does it right. So that’s kind of why people have this surprise thing of like, you know, Oracle went from having this third rate, you know, bad cloud reputation, all of a sudden, you’re winning these, you know, tiktoks, and zooms, and Ubers, and a bunch of others that are just scaling up, like adapt, and cohere, and Mosaic and all these AI companies are flocking to us. And they’re kind of like why? Well, it’s because we had the ability to do with three years what took AWS and GCP 10, because we had Larry’s funding, and his ability to go hire at 500 engineers in Seattle, to go build a literally a skunkworks project of unbelievable engineering talent to rethink the cloud. Now the challenge is, you’ve got it, you’ve built it, but nobody knows about it. Now you’ve got to figure out how to activate all the broad partners and figure out how to go out and tell the world you know, there are other ways to build clouds. And sometimes when you actually rethink about the hardware layer and say, what have we engineered the hardware to be a better cloud, I have to remind everybody this thing, Bob Evans got run away. But we bought son in 2010. We have all these massive high performance engineers who have been building Exadata and clustered systems to run our own applications at high performance that we turn them loose on this stuff with these cloud engineers, and the two of them got together and started engineering whole different architectures to deliver the cloud. I’ll describe some of it in a little bit. But that’s kind of the premise behind it is you know, they went down this path of blank piece of paper, knowing what you know now what Do you do different, they did some amazingly different things, Vince Menzione 10:02 which, you know, strikes me thinking back to this time, like it felt like Oracle went dark on the cloud. And that’s exactly what you described is what happened behind the scenes, the skunkworks project, right? Ross Brown 10:14 I mean, field still had targets to go sell stuff. But largely, you know, the motivation wasn’t there, because the success wasn’t there. And salespeople build on success, you know, you can’t ask the world’s most effective enterprise sales force to go fail year after year. Like, that’s demotivating. Right, you can’t do that. And so the imperative imperative was not you dummies, go sell a bad product, the the imperative was build a better product, and then, you know, figure out how to activate. So we focused on database and license and still we’re selling cloud, but it was rough times for the field. Now, you know, they have this platform where you know, the number one reaction we get from customers, and this is the warning, I’ll tell partners, because a lot of partners are unaware of OCI. And in many cases, we’re working in an Oracle practice inside of a large partner, not the cloud practice. And the common practice gets surprised because their customer hears from another partner or somebody else about what OCI is. And their general reaction is, why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told and I have to always remind people, we just finished it. You’re not late. It’s not like it’s been out there for 10 years, like literally, like we passed Google in 2021. In terms of the Gartner scorecard, and we’re just continuing to scale even better now. So it’s very new. And I want to give everyone permission to not be like, I should know about it. Well, no, now it’s time to learn about it. But it’s very new. It’s very different. Let’s Vince Menzione 11:34 double click here, right? For those of us that don’t know, right, what differentiates Oracle Cloud from the other guys? Ross Brown 11:42 Well, first, let’s talk about what’s wrong with the cloud. And then we can talk about how you fix it. Let’s dig in. And the reason I say this is because this is just how the cloud operates. And one of the most clever things, and I hate to use this phrasing this way. But the most clever thing is the three hyperscalers convinced the world, the way they work is the way the cloud works. And so when you come and say no, you can do things a different way that actually is better. You can arguments of well, that’s not the cloud, are you sure it is, it’s all automated. It’s all scaled services and stuff like that. So I’ll describe what’s wrong with the current cloud. The problem with the current cloud is a network topology problem, combined with a control plane problem. And I’ll explain what I mean by a network topology problem is the noisy neighbor. Right? I lose you. Okay, let’s try it. Yeah. So the noisy neighbor problem, which is, you know, if you’re in an AWS server and your muse, bad example, you’re in a container based application running on that server, and then some shard of a database on a related server, that same rack is running a recommendation engine for, you know, the Netflix service, okay, when new episodes of Stranger Things hits huge amounts of packets coming out that thing, it’s going to create network latency that slows down your application. So what do you do you build things in containers, you build stateless databases, so you don’t have to maintain a stateful connection, you don’t have to have that, you know, performance dependent on latency, you build cloud apps performance independent of latency, right? Well, there, you’re trading off a huge amount of efficiency when you do that. So I’m just going to give a very simple example of this how often a CPU core is sitting waiting for data before it can progress where it’s thread is, in essence, waiting on a packet to come back. And collisions can sometimes be 20 30% of the network traffic, which means for every dollar and compute you’re spending in the cloud, you might be burning 20 to 25 cents in wasted compute cycles, that are inefficient because of an inefficient network. Okay, well, that gets offensive. And also by the way, the more successful the cloud provider gets, the more they oversubscribed, their network, which also ends up creating more idols compute cycles that aren’t being productively used, but are waiting on the network. So they have their own positive, negative self reinforcing economics here, which is we make more money, the more congested the network is, right? perverse economics are everywhere in the cloud, you’re gonna learn there’s all sorts of negative incentives and stuff that just are weird. Alright, so what did we do? We did a couple of things. One, we built a control plane, that’s an off box GPU, so our control plane doesn’t run on the same hardware as client tenancy. So what does that do? Well, it does four things when it gives us bare metal as a service. Like I can provision an entire server because my control plane can issue firmware and refresh it and doing this 9001 scrub on it, boot drives and all that other sort of stuff that you need to do and do it in a completely touchless way. No humans involved in the provisioning no humans involved in the reclamation, but that’s trying to get to the bare metal, which is a really core concept for us to do some stuff later. But it also means a couple of really key security things. One, I’m not running on the same hardware as the client as a result, it privilege escalation within a client VM can’t bridge to the control plane and get access to other clients. There’s a hardware gap between the client hardware running in this off box can data processing unit that’s managing the control playing. And so that non shared hardware gives me some security in terms of that. But it also gives me the ability to be the only cloud to give the customer encryption keys and tell them you own your own keys. There’s no shared keys in OCI. And so unlike other clouds, where they have to be able to see into the hardware, because the control plane is running there, I don’t have to. So I can actually give people full encryption to their tenancies, and they own it. And I don’t need to peek into it, which is very secure. I mean, that’s generally it. But here’s the big one, all the logging and observability data that’s coming up that control plane is occurring on a different network segment than the neck network traffic and the tenant. Right. So now I’ve taken this massive firehose of observability data and logging data and pointed it elsewhere. It’s no longer on the same segment as the client. But let’s talk about network segments here for a second. Okay, the next part, it gets technical. And you know, for the folks that are involved in alliances in marketing, I’m going to tell you, the easiest way to absorb what I’m going to talk about next, is to go read just the summary paragraphs of the Wikipedia articles for a couple of terms. It really does a great job of breaking it down in layman’s terms in a way that makes sense. But I know this is gonna sound technically dense, don’t let it scare you. It’s really important. So I have to give that warning because I get lots of people in my own team or partner managers. When I started telling him this there, I used to see their eyes go, That’s outstanding. That’s like no, really kind of important because, you know, we’re not a joke all the time. We’re not working for Kimberly Clark, or Rubbermaid. We’re not selling, you know, diapers and trash cans, we’re selling the most advanced tech platform on the planet. So some of the core features you should know. Alright, so what did we do, we built a different type of network, we did something that’s not common, but not unusual. And then something that’s really unusual, the common, the unusual, but not terribly unusual thing is we built a different topology. So instead of a top of rack switch that acts like a switch for things in the rack and a router for east west traffic, we built a folded leaf and spine network topology, which if you go talk to somebody who’s a Cisco engineer, they’ll tell you that is the way you should design a network because it creates what’s called a slow, non blocking network. And that’s c l o s, named after Charles called mathematician. non blocking network basically means you can create a new connection between systems without disrupting an existing connection. That’s a non blocking networks, the way phone systems work, you know, when the operator connects one, you know, connect phone to another connection, that’s a dedicated line between those two, and she can connect another connection to another connection, it has nothing to do with that other connection. That’s in essence, what a non blocking network does in a packet based network. But that’s only the answer, right? That’s part of it. We also and this is the part by the way, we’re pretty FinCEN as a genius. And I’ll say this in every public forum, I can, he built a virtualization device. It’s a hardware based virtualization device on the RJ 45 ports that allows us to virtualize traffic at the data frame layer, meaning instead of operating at TCP IP at the protocol layer, like every other cloud, we’re able to operate at the signal layer, which means there’s no collisions between your workload and any other tenant or control plane on OCI. As a result, there’s no latency inside your network. And as a result, you can run bare metal, and you can run stateful databases in real time. And you can run with this next part. Okay, so that’s clever, right? We did this non blocking network, no latency, all this other stuff, bare metal, off box control plane, great networks, where they just, they just went over the top, they decided to put remote direct memory access over converged Ethernet backplanes, which allow any processor in a rack and Intel or AMD or Nvidia GPU rec, it allows any one of those processors to access the memory or GPUs in any other server on that rack, without going through the CPU bus, they can go directly to it, which allows us to cluster you know, 400 processors in a single cluster and petabytes of memory into a single cluster. So now you’ve got an environment that on a hardware level can run, you know, bare metal can run, you know, non blocking high performance networking can do GPU clusters at scale, can do you know anything having to do with DB two clusters, or Oracle Application clusters or, you know, VMware clusters, or any of those things where you need bare metal cluster together, we can do it natively as a service. And so that opens up like an incredible amount of throughput. But the most interesting thing is, because I’m not blocking, I’m not losing 20 to 30% of my compute to the network, as a result, application, take less resources, you need less VMs, you need less bare metal, things are more efficient, and then ends up being naturally much more cheaper. So we ended up not only being much faster, but a lot less expensive than other clouds to operate it but there’s other little stuff that’ll get on the business side, but just unpack the technology. That’s kind of a key thing. The little coda to it is that RDMA capability that we built, we built a version of that for our in video racks, that has a second folded leaf and spine overlay network on just the GPUs, which gives us the ability uniquely to do you know, theoretically 32,768 A one Hundreds are each one hundreds in a single cluster, and do it with 1600 bisection bandwidth across the entire thing. So the point of which is we’ve built this monster that can absolutely outperform anything else on the planet, and every single major AI company with except for the ones that have done first party deals like anthropic and, you know, open AI, and folks that are being built on other clouds, we have over 32 of the AI companies that are worth more than 250 million in private equity or VC value are building on OCI. And so that’s kind of a when you build something different. We have this weird environment where we go into enterprises, and they’re like, oh, no, we’re locked into Azure. We’re doing ACI with AWS, that’s our cloud. We’re single cloud, we’re doing that. How’s it going? Well, you know, it’s rough and hard to get some of these legacy stuff to work. But we’re doing mainframes and that stuff. And then you walk into an Uber and you show them, we built this thing in the cloud centric guys look at it go. Well, that’s amazing. We’re going there immediately, let’s fast as we can, right? So this dichotomy where we built something that folks are on the bow wave of technology, and building the most advanced cloud services and most advanced generative AI platforms just adopting us like crazy. And that’s what I’m trying to tell partners is like, this massive opportunity to be the first person to tell an enterprise customer about what OCI is, and how differentiated as I know, I’ve talked a lot, and I’ll pause for a second. But the business side of this thing is the crazier part, I’ll just hit a highlights our egress costs are 90%, lower compared to every other cloud, we don’t charge for security or observability tools, they’re all free. They’re built into the cost. Because we only have enterprise customers who don’t have startups, like no one’s going to run an enterprise class application without a managed NAT gateway or firewall or without observability on so we just made all that stuff free managed. Kubernetes is free. I mean, most customers have a 50% reduction in their cloud costs and a jump in performance when they move over to us. So that’s the high level. So Vince Menzione 21:49 massive speed, massive efficiency and much lower cost. Ross Brown 21:54 Yeah, I mean, there’s too much to unpack that’s but it’s things like, every other cloud kind of starts there egress fees at 10 gigabytes, we’re 90% lower, but we don’t start charging until 10 terabytes, there’s no cost to move things between availability zones, and our cloud because we own the network. So moving stuff, between five, it’s all free. So it’s just if you thought about if you’re designing a cloud over with the notion that the world’s going to be multi cloud, even if you’re the only iOS platform they’re using, they’re going to use SAS platform, because they’re gonna have other people running stuff. So data has to move, you can’t build it with the notion of this, you know, my cloud, everybody stay out, and I own your data. It just doesn’t make any sense anymore. Anyway, that’s what we do. That’s why I came here. Vince Menzione 22:34 So yeah. And so let’s click in on, you know, how do you get a how do you get clients? How do you get partners onboard? How do you build your ecosystem strategy? So you alluded to a little bit of this Ross, right, because I know for a fact that Google, one of Google’s big blockers has been getting the technologists on board, right, getting into that third cloud. So what are you doing differently now? Ross Brown 22:55 So a couple of things, there’s kind of three modes that we operate in. So if you think about like, the state, the customer might be, there’s kind of the dog bites man like this never makes headlines, but it’s moving the Oracle estate on to OCI. Alright, so we’re moving our exit data. We’re moving our custom apps, removing all the app X stuff, we’ve done all third party apps and all that stuff. Great. Your EBS and ERP systems aren’t stuck to fusion, our SaaS platform wonderfully, you’ve done it, nobody gets headlines on that. That’s and they kind of want to set out this is kind of the customer thing, where you’ve got somebody who’s the CTO or CIO or technologist head of DevOps, who’s made a hard bet, we’re going to GCP we’re going all in on Thomas’s promises, or we’re going up here to Azure or whatever. And for good reasons. I mean, those I’m not denigrating those other clients, they do a good job at the things they do in cloud native and some of the services they have, but they can’t do what we do. We’re just differentiating, and that’s the nature of clouds right now is it’s not there for hyperscalers. It’s there are four different clouds that are currently devolving into different direction. And it becomes important to think about what do you want from each one of us, not which one’s best? That’s kind of a false narrative. It’s starting to become really interesting leads to our Satya adularia conversation we’re having a moment. Yeah, Vince Menzione 24:03 we’re gonna dig in there in a minute. That’s sort of the elephant in the room, we got to unpack on that. Ross Brown 24:09 You know, for us, this sort of first case is actually a trap. Like when I saw the Let’s Move the Oracle apps to OCI, what ends up happening is, I’ve got the CTO who’s like, we’re going all the way to GCP or everything on Azure. And then over here is like, Yeah, what about us over here in the ERP land, and us over here in epic, where we’re running an EMR that’s very stateful and all those things, maybe this cloud thing can’t do everything because you told us this will take 12 months, and we’re a month 18 We still don’t have a go live date. You know, all these sorts of my theory up here that I’ve banked. My career on has this Inconvenient Truth of stateful database applications that don’t work really well and are sometimes really impossible to rewrite. And so the minute I moved those to OCI, I’ve taken away the pain. Now it’s like, of course, Oracle built a specialized cloud that’s really good at running Oracle and that’s all it’s good for. And so they get this thing in their head of like, that’s all it’s there for is running Oracle apps and they never connect the fact that to run our stuff, we had to build something that can run really performance applications really well, which means we also run cloud native really well, we run serverless really well and much more efficient stuff. So that doesn’t click in that first one, right? I haven’t typically an Oracle partner in there doing stuff moving. The next state is where we go. And we work with a partner, typically a regional si or a GSI. And we sit down, we do this on an industry basis, like we don’t do this as horizontal, like, Let’s go sell a thing. Like, let’s go sell GoldenGate data replication, and let’s go sell a database. It’s what solve a problem. And that’s kind of a really big ethos of like, constantly telling salespeople and everybody involved, like, you’re going to show up to a customer meeting, show up and solve a problem, because that’s the only ever gonna sell a cloud as solve a problem. Whether that’s giving them a way of thinking about the problem that leads them to a technical solution, or actually architecting a technical solution. Those are both valuable roles, but don’t show up and tell them how good you are, show up and solve a problem. So we do that with partners, we sit down with our GSI. And regionals, we say all right now, let’s think about retail as an example. And so because we’re all organized in the industry sales team, so I get my Retail Cloud engineer, note, not salespeople, my Retail Cloud engineer, my partner, cloud engineer, from my team, and somebody from Accenture, Deloitte, or IBM, or you Pam or whoever we get together with them, we say all right, now let’s think about all the retail customers you have and what problems they have, that they’re struggling to solve with their current cloud provider, regardless of who that is. And inevitably, it comes down to stuff they’re still buying Dell and HPE gear for because they can’t take it to the cloud, or things that need to run in a regulated environment and can’t go to the public region and all those sorts of things, you know, things that require deep integration into their retail transaction systems that are running in micros our platform. Great, let’s build an ML system that looks and does predictive assortment planning for what should go into which retail store for the postseason. So we come up with these five or six things, right. The important criteria for them is they have to meet three conditions. Number one, they have to solve a real problem for the customer. No contrived problems, no, like Did you know security problems from you might know, like, if that’s not already on the customer’s list of stuff I got to solve, it doesn’t qualify. So real problems, have real budgets, hypothetical problems have hypothetical budgets. So real problem, the second thing we want to do is want to solve a problem for the partner, which is a net new project, not a cannibalization of existing work. So if they’re in the middle of an 18 month application modernization for a particular app, and we know it would run better and OCI, we shut up, we go and focus on the thing that customer can’t solve, that creates net new work for the partner doesn’t blow up their 18 month migration project and turn it into a six week bare metal bare metal conversion. Like I mean, we can do that. But that’s not good for the partner. And lastly, and this is the most important is it must position OCI in an absolutely non Oracle context, it really can’t be, you know, here’s Golden Gate replicating your exit data system for Dr. Right? Okay, that’s just more dog bites, man. Once we do that, and we do that the customer has an aha moment, we get certified as a general use Cloud. And then our strategy is alright, for each customer. That’s really key, which to be clear globally, there’s like 3000 of them that really matter to Oracle at a deep level, like they’re really important to us. We just go in by industry and say alright, financial services, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America, who are the partners, that customer is choosing to do work, because those are the builders that like, the fact that I’ve got, I’m in there and AWS is in there, which cloud are they going to build on? Well, there’s some weight based on the value of our cloud and the economics and the overall deal and stuff like that. But a big part of it is Accenture says, No, this is going to run better and OCI. Hey, we went it. So at that point, it becomes our job is to pitch work for partners. And now think about how profoundly different that is from working from 10 years ago. In order for us to drive consumption our cloud, we have to form pitch and close work for our partners to succeed. Yeah, Vince Menzione 28:54 it’s foreign foreign language from the Oracle right, right now, Ross Brown 28:58 to be clear, not universally spoken, it’s like still a cultural transformation. But what’s happening is the 75 or so Cloud leaders across the 4000 or so 4600 people in North America who are driving 80 plus percent of our revenue are all doing that, and winning at scale. And the ones who are kind of like, I’m still thinking about suing my customer, they’re just not working out. And so this transition towards show up and do something valuable, solve something, build something with a partner. It’s a profound shift, but it’s kind of in keeping with Oracle’s engineering history of building profoundly different and accelerated and performance solutions, which is really all Exadata and ERP. And those things Vince Menzione 29:36 are and everything you’re saying strikes of high performance, right? So you’re talking financial services, right? You’re talking where millisecond matter in terms of transactional data in terms of grading and so on. Ross Brown 29:47 Right? You need a credit response in 60 milliseconds. Yeah. Vince Menzione 29:50 And what about health care? I think you did you talk about epic. I thought you were you mentioned epic here. I was thinking about some of them Ross Brown 29:58 are competitive with Cerner. We acquired but you know, they’re like one of the things we always want to convey is, I’ll tell you that here’s a little aha, this is not a secret, by the way, I wish it it was a secret that it would seem like things that people have to go tell people because it’s compelling and stuff like that, because it’s secret. This is actually a public reference. And it’s just surprising to people. The largest SAP instance running in a public cloud is running on OCI. It’s Loblaws out of Canada, large retailer, large retail, and they have a massive SAP footprint and they’re not going to Hana. They’ve made the decision that they like running, the way they’re going to run until they make a decision to do whatever they’re going to do in the future. But they needed a public cloud to close out a data center. And so we talked about OCI as being an enterprise app environment for every enterprise key platform, not just Oracle estate. So you hear me use examples talking about epic and SAP and talking about, you know, sasinstitute large data warehouses and stuff because it’s really important for folks to know that we don’t get into this is so important for you know, internal inside of Oracle is a big transformation of we don’t get to litigate people’s past. The decisions they’ve made, they’ve made the investments they’ve made an IBM they’ve made an IBM the investments, they’ve made an Informatica they made Informatica. So what do we do we do a partnership with Informatica and Mary’s their data governance tools with our data management tools into a single cloud solution. We do deals with Red Hat and OpenShift to make sure their platforms are certified on OCI so that IBM consulting can scale their own software on our platform without worrying about, there’s some competitive oil and gas platform from Oracle or whatnot. So this notion of working well with competitors is absolutely critical to our success. Vince Menzione 31:34 I’m so excited to announce our continued partnership with ag one. Many of you know, I 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 over six years ago, I found 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 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 ag one travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M. That’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M. Check it out. I want to dive in a little bit on the Larry thing. But I really would like to double click with you on how you organize for success. Right with your partners. I thought I heard regional national si GSI advisory as a main focus and catalyst for success. Is that how you’re going to market across the verticals that you discussed? Ross Brown 33:00 Not really let me talk about this way. So if you thought of this as a pivot table, the primary high order filter is industry, who’s active in what industry and stuff. So for me, like and I’ll just illustrate using our friends at Accenture because they’re a really good partner for us. Right? We have an Oracle practices run by Samia Turriff. She’s an amazing leader does a great job. She’s got folks in North America like Brian Kolinsky and Nish Patel who worked with us amazingly good people right inside the Oracle practice that’s still separate than their cloud first practice, which is where cloud engineers are that are working with AWS and GCP and all that stuff. Okay, that’s kind of think of it as vendor land, like, who manages which vendor? And how do we interact with them stuff. But then there’s, you know, 17 different micro industries that have their own practices around retail and life sciences different than healthcare. Those are the ones we really engage with. So we drive relationships to drive connections between that customer facing, I own a business problem that can be solved with technology, combined with our team in terms of I understand how technology can solve problems. And together they come and then we work with the delivery team. We’re deeply aligned with the Oracle practice around Oracle estate and around deals and what we’re doing there. But you have to think of it as in a lot of cases industry is the main lens, and it’s supported and backed up by you know, tech practices. You understand our tech, but we don’t go in with we’ve got Golden Gate, what problems can we solve, we go in with, you know, this is a great one with Deloitte. We have this company, it’s an oil and gas. And they have a particular challenge, which is they run a lot of oil rigs in Oklahoma and North Dakota in places that, frankly don’t have cell coverage. And nobody’s stringing wires out there to run a Wi Fi hotspot. And they need to figure out like how can we do anomaly detection in real time with machine learning on these rigs? Because when a 70,000 pound hydraulic wrench goes the rigs down for two weeks, and I might have lost two people in the in the accident. And so we put a thing called roving edge, which is a cloud delivered me up I went and put a VM an object store. So this is my boot VM, you put a pin in it to the address, and it runs out and it gets shipped to whatever location you put the pin in, it boots up without needing to hop on over to the cloud. And it begins running a thing called M set to multistate estimation technique to, which is an anomaly detection routine that Oracle has. And so now we’re doing 7000, or something like 2700 sensors or something on this rig are being processed in real time by a cloud delivered appliance that’s completely disconnected as a way to solve it. That’s what I mean by solve a problem no other cloud can solve. Now all of a sudden, this energy companies like what else can Oracle do? Because they thought about an oil and gas problem? Not? How do I land this tech? How do I solve a problem on a remote rig? Right? That’s where we engage with partners about so when we do that, that first order bit of solve industry problems, everything else self organizes, it’s like, oh, you’re an MSP. Okay, so you’re gonna run this when we’re done solving it? Okay, great. You’re a CSP, you’re gonna manage the contract? Fantastic. Let’s go that way. But it’s still solution first. Now, how are we going to transact? So Vince Menzione 36:01 industry solution? I’ll say industry customer solution. First, right? Sort of in that order? How do you think about the soul? Because you know, the others come at the whole world of ISVs. Right? They come out and say we want every ISV on our platform, willing to do co selling with how do you think about that ISV ecosystem? Or does it even matter? Ross Brown 36:22 It does, it matters a lot, but I’m also recognizing that the ISPs will follow their customers inclinations, the ISPs rarely leave their customers inclinations, meaning if I’m a certain platform, and I’m only available on Azure, because I’m a dotnet heavy application like Nin Tex or it’s a great example A they built a SharePoint accelerator, great company. They only exist on Azure, if I want to use that text, I’m using Azure, that’s it done. There’s very few captive, big Venn diagram, there’s very few ISVs that are generally relevant to enterprise that are also single cloud. Now, there are many that are three hyperscalers, and not OCI, like snowflake, data, bricks and go through all those folks. But that’s okay. I mean, I can’t emphasize this enough, like, the argument over where an application sets is less relevant than where the data sets. And the data set is more relevant as it relates to future uses and generative AI, then it matters to the application right now. So do I need to aggregate all this sort of applications and stuff? No, I need to be able to provide data services at the point, the customer needs them to be able to give them the platform that they consolidate all of the view they have of the world into one architecture. And then architecture for us is OCI. And it’s Oracle database and exa data services and autonomous and all these things we’ve got going on it right. So this leads into what are Sarah, what are Larry and sati? Up to? Yeah, let’s Vince Menzione 37:43 get in there. Well, this is what the whole you talked about the data. So let’s go over there. Right. So it’s about two plus weeks. But by the time this airs is probably almost a month. But you know, Larry Ellison flies to Redmond for the first time. By the way, I think he said he’d never been to Renton. And before sits down with Satya. Alisa Taylor interviews them right. And so she airborne pat this epic moment. And Did hell freezes over what happened? Well, first Ross Brown 38:08 off, the press does a better job of driving these story arcs about, you know, contention between companies and stuff like that. And the reality is, customers rule this stuff. Like if you go and sit down with Citibank or Goldman Sachs, they will tell you, they don’t care at all about this, you know, CEO egos and which company is doing what and those sorts of things, it doesn’t matter. If they want you to work together, if you’re gonna work together. That’s how it’s gonna go. So the reality is, clouds are diverging. And if you think about a couple of things, right. And this is I’m gonna say, now, I’m gonna go into my opinion here on a lot of this, but it’s informed by, you know, looking at what we do, and talking with ourselves and talking with Microsoft. But, you know, largely, you think about where do you want to invest in the future? Like, where are you gonna put your money? Well, okay, so you’ve got a lot of customers out there who want to move their core applications to Azure. Why? Because they’re dotnet heavy shop, they’ve got big investments in SharePoint, they’ve done a lot around Power BI, they’ve invested in the toolset. If you think about break that down, that’s really an M 365 customer with a back end, right? That’s not a I’m a global banking system running a systemically important bank, most of those are still running their own data centers. They’re not running in the public cloud. Okay, so how do you deal with those, those those become really hard ones, right? So what’s really valuable in the long running take about the economics of at $30 a month for AI copilot as an added in 365. The economics of the margin of that are astounding, when you roll out like it two and a half percent of their installed base and 365. You’re like a trillion dollar put implied valuation improvement to there. There’s market cap. So what does it take to run that? Well, it takes a massive cloud infrastructure. How much of that do you want dedicated to running legacy apps at scale, versus building this future thing that’s gonna monetize productivity? forever. Like, I’m sad the I’m going to be sitting there going, one of these things is going to submit me into like the way the world works for the rest of the next decade or so at a minimum, right? And one of these is going to solve a CIOs problem. Like, like, Okay, now go well, and Vince Menzione 40:17 he spent practical you talk about ego, he puts the ego down, right? I mean, he, Ross Brown 40:21 I think, look, I’m gonna tell you, the cloud has been an ego deflating thing for a lot of folks, in the sense that it’s hard to win. Like, it’s hard to win. And you want to step back. And if you’re a guy who likes winning the way Larry does, you step back and think hard. By the way, Larry smart, very easy to get in trouble for this one. But the smartest person I’ve worked with at Oracle is claiming gorrik, he was the VP of cloud, he is strategic. He is intelligent, and he’s company’s customer empathetic, the dude is fantastic. And I can’t think of a better leader for this company to have running this stuff. So enough, you know, saluting the boss that the guy really like, he walked into a strategy meeting and once asked a question, which I think I’ll just digress here for a second. Then we’ll talk about Larry and Satya, he walks into a strategy meeting when I was in the outbound Product Manager marketing stuff. And he says, do you think 195 sovereign countries are going to let three Americans in two Chinese guys control access to the world’s IP systems? When you phrase it that way? Of course not. And he’s like, the world doesn’t need a fourth cloud, the world needs hundreds of more clouds in order to solve that problem. And that led him down the path towards alloy, which is where we build cloud regions that are operated by partners and are differentiated, they build in third party services. Think of it as like the way Dell makes servers that then companies turn into SAS offerings, we make entire cloud platforms that companies turn into their own offerings and, you know, can run as a telephone company in a foreign country can run it as a sovereign cloud for their government to you know, Pan institutions like the EU can run one across, we’re doing that we have one in Spain, and one in Frankfurt, that’s a sovereign cloud, that’s all run by the EU as a one way only data goes in, nothing can be exfiltrated out of the EU type environments. But that notion of thinking through like, What Does the world really need? Not how do we win? What does the world really need to do we really think we’re serving the world and we just create another hyperscale. Or do we need to create a fabric that allows every partner out there who has material footprint for these enterprise customers to deliver and create their own cloud. Now, if I told you 10 years ago, I got in a time machine and went back to 2013, when I’m at Microsoft, or we’re getting Azure changes done, and all that other stuff that in the future, not only would Oracle have the best cloud, but they would have the most partners centric cloud strategy of anybody out there, I would have punched you pushed you back in the time machine and said, Go back and expand go look a little longer, right? Anyway, so that, that leads to things like if you’re gonna go down that path, which is we’re building clouds for other people. And we’re doing that with around the world with different companies we’re not doing in the US yet, because we’ve got some very big nuts to crack here in the US first, but if you if you start going that path of we build clouds for other people, it’s not that far of a leap to say we should put a miniature OCI region inside Azure data centers, and make Oracle Data Services and Oracle application services available to companies that have made a commitment to Azure and really need the stateful database need that bare metal performance need the capabilities that OCI can bring, but not expensive, move everything out of Azure move whatever. Plus, if I bought a $20 million Mac deal, and I’ve got these credits are gonna roll off, I want to wait and burn them down, that’s actually productive. And if I’m gonna go pitch now, this is where we go back to the business side, if I’m gonna go ask a sales team to go ask customers to open a PO for several hundreds of millions of dollars to get access to open AI, I better be on the right side of the value curve and stuff. I’ve sold it in the past. And so there is a huge how we solve problems fast for these customers together, how do we get them to a point where we’ve solved their legacy issues, their past is done. Now let’s start building generative AI services for that let’s start building the future. And that’s something that you’re gonna see largely isn’t a toss up of which cloud do I choose? It’s which LLM system Am I using and which ones have the right features. And then all the sudden data movement between clouds becomes imperative, right? So the relationship between us and Microsoft makes a ton of sense. When you look at where we’re both going. Like Microsoft’s going down a path around personal productivity and making people in the illusion Oh, there we go. down a path of making people more productive. It’s been in their core mission. If you look about, you know, their unlimited potential work they’ve done and everything, their whole way of being is been, how do you unlock the human? Right? How do you make it better? If you look at Oracle’s whole way of being it’s how do you make the world work better? Not individuals, the world? How do you make the systems that run things more efficient? How do you build intelligence into those processes? How do you reduce the effort of labor that’s required for the world to be a fair a better place for economics to work for healthcare to work for other things? So we’re not at cross purposes, we’re at very different goals in time. So what are companies are trying to do that when you start looking at that it’s sort of saying, well, the opportunity to collaborate is got way more upside to be partners than, you know, fighting over a nickel of old database revenue. Right? Absolutely. Vince Menzione 45:11 So how are you organizing from a business perspective, and we’ve got the technological perspective, government from a business perspective, I mean, a Microsoft salesperson going in and trying to sell this is going to require some chops, right, so who’s going to cover that? Ross Brown 45:27 They’re not really going to sell it, they’re gonna call us and we’re gonna get together like we had a love fest. So Steven Boyle, and Marvin and a bunch of other folks are down there with us meeting with partners and talking with them. Because I got it. I can’t let this go without talking about because it’s so important people understand. There’s a there’s a book by Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called a last chance to Vince Menzione 45:46 see a last chance to see okay, we’re gonna write this down, talks about endangered species. Ross Brown 45:51 It’s one of his nonfiction books, but it’s very finely written, it’s really well done. But it talks about him going and visiting endangered species as a last chance to see them before they disappear. And he talks about New Zealand. And he gives this sort of notion about and sets the tone for this bird that’s endangered called the Kakapo, which he lays out like this New Zealand paradise, where the Kakapo is like this flightless bird that sits in mountain hills and stuff, and makes this loud booming sound for miles as its mating call, which all of a sudden, Captain Cook shows up with dogs and boars and things like that. And all of a sudden, those dogs realized, the dinner just announces where it is. And it’s delicious. And they go and eat it, right. And so, I use this as a metaphor that Oracle has been like New Zealand, we’ve in the self contained ecosystem, right? We, we think about it, we walk in with our four core applications that run all your regulated systems, ERP, HCM supply chain, customer experience, we deliver that on an engineered appliance called Exadata. Running our database, running our operating system, running our Java Development Language, running a whole bunch of data tools built by us, I mean, it’s all integrated and delivered by OCS and then run by a partner afterwards and stuff. At this very narrow New Zealand like partner ecosystem, most of my partners only do Oracle, like wrap your head around. That’s all they do, is 100%. And they make a huge, great living, just running Oracle environments for customers and helping them sort out how to upgrade their exit data environments and getting the replication and they’re deep experts in this stuff. Like they know this stuff. There’s no dabblers in my channel. Now all of a sudden, every Azure partner out there says there’s a path to solve this enterprise. And it doesn’t mean we have to rewrite this thing. Because, frankly, that ain’t going well. We could just put it on the OCI regional, it goes live, hey, does anybody here know anything about Oracle, and all of a sudden it becomes like, I need an exit date expert. So the partner is partnering with partner is going to be huge between us because I’ve got this non competitive set of partners that all they do is Oracle, and all of a sudden they have this partner that can work with that all they do is Azure, and they understand Microsoft really well. So there’s really natural alignment there that we’re trying to take advantage of, of, how do you connect them together as quickly as possible, get them to understand each other’s value, be able to subcontract now from a commercial term standpoint, this they could not have made this easier. It’ll be a private offer inside of Microsoft’s marketplace. You’ll redeem credits, it’ll redeem for UC credits that will be deployable against the OCI instance, Vince Menzione 48:15 salespeople will get credit. And you mentioned Steven Boyle, who is now leading the Kindle relationship at Microsoft, the former IBM organization that has now Kindle so there’s there’s synergies there, right, bringing those units together and selling together. Yep. And I see probably be doing more of those. You mentioned Accenture, and we can go across the GSIs that are managed by both organizations. I Ross Brown 48:37 just broadly say I kind of have three partner motions of spinning plates in that thing, and in a reflects this, this is the longer conversation I mentioned before we got on camera, this change, right? So I have four types of backup, not three, four types of partners. I have my deep Oracle, you know, love guy was like the intensity and centroid student networks, they just they drive our business, the backbones of it. And they they’re just great partners are deep Oracle deeply invested profitable, like they it’s a good business to be in right. Then I’ve got, you know, kind of the legacy generalists who are kind of still in the reselling contracts mode, kind of in the godson cloud services, not sure we’re going to be when we grow up. They’re struggling a lot to deal with this transition that I see in the marketplace between kind of this horizontal layers of organization that partners organizing, like if you think about typical apartment, say, Well, I got a Dell, titanium Black, who also is a Cisco Gold partner and an EMC partner and I help customers refactor their network and I help them with storage refresh, and I help them with their five year server refresh. Well, why don’t I just do I’d find myself in terms of vendors, and in terms of horizontal layers of acquisition and supply chain, where you might have great technical skills and going from the Cisco seven KV to the nine KV switch. But the cloud isn’t organized that way. It’s now every cloud gets its own stack from core compute and storage all the way up to observability. And you have to prescribe the whole thing, which kind of means your bench for any given reasonably sized partner is at a minimum 500 people, otherwise you don’t have enough depth of discipline to be able to do it. So then I look at these partners who have like 1.2 billion in bookings and stuff like that, and 200 people on their bench and I’m like, You guys are still doing wrench turning, you’re doing install the rack, you’re not doing run the app the whole horizontal. So this movement from horizontal layers to vertical areas, all the incentives change and moves from, go drive a storage refresh to I need to drive workloads and workload that workload and workload and that becomes about continuous delivery of value and continuous building of consumption value that you’re driving. That’s so different than the winner take all follow the sales rep, because in our sales model, our sales reps are going in and convincing the customer on us OCI, and by the way, by Oracle dollars, the same way you buy Mac credits, nobody gets paid until you actually start using them. So let’s start building something, right? Anyway. So the stuff with Microsoft we’re really excited about because it opens up for us an opportunity to solve customer problems that are rooted in history, because the opportunity for us across our industry units across the vertical market apps across our Sass platform across OCI is really about how do you scale more efficiency into the application by using intelligence, whether that’s data to your intelligence or AI or ml services or whatever? That’s where we’re going? Yeah, no, Vince Menzione 51:27 this is good. This is good. And we could, you’re right, we could go three hours. I’m gonna keep us on because we’ve got a lot to unpack. And you know what, Ross? I think I’m gonna have you back for sure. So we’re gonna, maybe we’ll even do a whole series on OCI I think more be a lot of fun to do. But like, I want to dig in like, okay, as you’re you have a partner ecosystem, you’ve got people managing that partner ecosystem, you’re obviously you have, you have some partners that are massively successful. Right, Ross Brown 51:53 I started seeing the report types, I would have just closed them the last two real quick. The one is the GSI. Right, the massive organizations and stuff. But this last one is the folks that are living in AI, and ML is their turf like, quantify, win. And those are fascinating partners. Man, the work we’re doing with them is like one of my favorite things. A cloud recently was being in a roundtable around AI, where we had quantify who’s got 4000 People are all data scientists. And they’re building their own generative large language models on that, because they can foundation models and training. And then penguin who has built the hardware environments. And then also the large language models. And in AI is for guys like meta in the same room with partners that are trying to figure out how to, you know, get eight GPUs and a large language model to start doing something. But just the, the awareness of you cannot move fast enough to really understand the data architectures and what’s going on in these things because it is going to move and I made this prediction of the conference, I just will jump to this point, which is right now, if if you go and you spend time on Twitter, or you look at Reddit and things like that, you see a lot of social media in the tech community is around developer communities, getting developers together getting DevOps folks together talking about orchestration or something that’s truly a real big thing right now. And I made this prediction within five years, prompt engineering communities among business leaders will dwarf what’s going on in developer communities. Teaching business people how to get AI to do valuable things for them is a new PageMaker. And it just like, you know, when PageMaker came out, and unlocked a whole bunch of creativity, including a whole bunch of really badly published church bulletins, you’re gonna have the same thing where a whole bunch of really badly created AI is going to be out there, not productive. And the folks who really understand this stuff are going to be scaling. And so I love these conversations, we have these new types of partners, who are just living this every day with the most advanced companies on the planet, and just the gap is jarring. And just partners realizing like I cannot do this fast enough. I cannot. This is not a Hey, guy as this weekend, why don’t you read up on the new Cisco stuff, this is take everybody out of the field for a month and put them through intensive training right now. Vince Menzione 53:57 And infusing AI into every business application, every application whatsoever consumer business application, right, Ross Brown 54:03 it’s getting every single business user out there will be a developer of AI services, because the services will be so easy to develop. I’m telling you, you’ll not write code, you’ll go into it. And you’ll tell a prompt what you’re looking for. And after about 12 versions of Okay, remember that last thing, but let’s change it this way. Now do this now. Can you add this to it and filter this out? Oh, I’ve got a workflow application that moves across six different systems that’s coming really fast. And I think one of the things partners have to realize is the wrench training business is rapidly going to become around how you put ideas to work. That’s hard. Vince Menzione 54:38 So as you organize your team are you doing so we can go into the like what makes a great partner you’ve you’ve you’ve basically double clicked on most of that. But are you doing practice building? Are you doing rolling? You’re doing both like what is happening in your organization, right, the classic BDMS and the classic sellers. Ross Brown 54:57 So I’m sort of pivoting I keep telling people Clouds are built, not bought, unless you can talk the language of others, it’s very hard to succeed here. So a lot of people learning fast and really responding well. And I’ll tell you like, I don’t need them to be engineers, I don’t need them to code, I need them to understand what the individual services do and how they solve problems. And that’s a big leap, if what you’ve been doing is channel transactions. So I have a lot of patients, and we’re going through training and workshops and stuff to raise everybody’s skill set around that. So that’s one second recruit like Oracle got very comfortable with, we have this installed base plus captive customers. And so when we have a new partner, it’s really at the expense of another partner, because it’s a zero sum game of installed managed services. So how much am I actually trying to get new partners versus getting my existing partners to get bigger now I’ve got this infinite platform of wonderful value, and I can’t get enough partners fast enough. So everybody in my team is learning to go out and pitch partners not on, here’s our policies and our incentives. But here’s the business value of working with us. And here’s why we’re really a good investment in that thing. So that’s new muscle, and then learning the language of industry of really starting to specialize and get deeper in there. And Vince, you’ve got a really good audience. So I’m going to ask to put an ad out real quick. I’ve opened roles right now that I’m looking for. And my ideal candidate is I need a partner Sales Lead for each industry, who’s going to work with the SVP of sales for that industry, and helping them define for that given industry? Who are the go to partners? What are we doing in each account? What’s the partner strategy in each account really owning that process? The ideal candidate who’s got 10 plus years in an ISV? Or a GSI? Where they focused on that practice? They should their peers within the industry should be able to pick up the phone and call your competitors and know them, Vince Menzione 56:39 and what industry specifically are you looking for? We’re gonna blast this out. Ross Brown 56:44 Okay, so, government, I’ve already got covered, I’ve got a team of 30 covering government sled and all that stuff. So that’s well covered. Randy’s got a fantastic org there. healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and healthcare. By the way, as life sciences embedded, eventually, we’ll go to sub industries and split some stuff out, like banking split out Vince Menzione 57:01 of Life Sciences, specifically, as opposed to payer provider, Ross Brown 57:05 we do both together right now, over time, that’ll like, my goal with these folks is eventually they’ll have an industry partner team under them, that they’ll hire and divide stuff, right. So healthcare, banking, and financial services, manufacturing oil and gas, retail, telecom it and media. Vince Menzione 57:23 And hospitality is last, it strikes me that media would be a big one as well. Ross Brown 57:27 Oh, well, I see, telco and media are a big one for us. Media, because our while our network efficiency plus the cost of our networking, we get guys like Kaltura, and zoom and eight by eight and folks like that, that do lots of digital media. But there’s something particular about our ARM platform being flat linear scaling, like you get all 80 cores working on media encoding. This is technical, but this is kind of fun for the technical folks out there. Like we’re the only cloud that doesn’t force you to use a specific VM instance size. Like when you come to OCI one of the things as different as you, you basically create a VM by saying, Do I want arm versus AMD versus Intel and how many cores and how much memory why we get so many media companies as they figured out they can come here and say I want 80 cores of memory. But I only need two gigs per core to do h 234 encoding and I can stream stuff. It’s very CPU intensive, doesn’t take much memory. So why pay for all the memory they’re not using. So they end up with these extremely low memory high media and they just love it. So we end up getting a footprint there. We run a lot of phone companies like the OSS BSS, and the mobile packet core, all that stuff is Oracle tech. So the infrastructure right phone companies have a big footprint with, its the IT guys we struggle with? Like they sort of think their own stuff is good. Yeah, Vince Menzione 58:45 I get you loud and clear. So I’m gonna pivot. We’re gonna pivot away from the business, though, I am going to ask you one more question for our listeners. But I’d love to pivot. As you might be aware, I spent a lot of time on the career development. I spent my time at Microsoft, I did early career development work, and a lot of our listeners are earlier in Korea. So I would love for you to share, like, was there a pivot? Was there a spark that got you on this journey, this amazing career that you’ve had? Ross, I know you started off in the early days of the channel, you were like 10 or 15, when you got started 30 years ago, but what was it that got you to this point? And you’re Ross Brown 59:22 so I was just having this conversation with somebody. It was kind of career discussions and stuff. Because they’re like, you know, if you look at your career, you’ve like executed a plan really well. You started out as a developer, and then you became a partner, then you were a distributor. And then you went to work for a big giant mothership company like IBM where you learned some global stuff. And then you went to work for this smaller company that you helped turn around and you built deal, REG and then you use that to become a pivot to be a CEO. And then he went to this massive global transformation, Microsoft. And I have to tell people, there’s no plan. There’s no plan. There’s no plan what there is, and this is kind of Only if there’s a secret anything, is there’s an insatiable desire to do something interesting. And to do something hard and fun. I like problem solving. And for me, and this is kind of, okay, this is gonna get really directive here for a second. There’s two things that have driven my career if there’s anything behind it. One is trying to find a problem where the technology is solved, but the go to market is all screwed up. Like so think about Citrix when I went to work there and technology is fantastic. But they had messed up their channel program to create an advantage for their Platnumz that allowed them to cannibalize everybody else. So go fix that we built deal read all of a sudden best product out there for VDI combined with fantastic economic incentives, think goes like this. Okay, same thing with Microsoft, I came to Microsoft in 2008 stock had fallen to $15 a share, we were going into a global economic crisis, great time to load up on basically RSUs and go figure out how to launch this cloud thing. And by the way, that’s no guarantee of success, Microsoft could have failed at that just as much as succeeded. And the case with VMware, it was hey, 85% of our revenues are tied in vSphere. We’ve got three other products that account for less than 15% We need to go build a channel that’s actually Multi Product, you can solve that the valuation on the company goes up. So between V sand V realized and NSX V center V realizes and attached to vSphere V realized the NSX is its own thing. So go build a channel around NSX and see if you can scale that. Now. Those two things have two things in common one, they’re interesting. It’s really clever technology. And you’ve got to like technology, by the way, if anyone’s taking a job out there because they think they’re gonna make money. And not because the technology is really cool and you want to tell people about it, you’re gonna fail. Like never do money do it because you really love what this thing does. And it could be really cool. So my inner nerd at all the time is after like, this stuff is really clever, like what Martine casado didn’t necessarily became an SX IS brilliant with clay, McCormack, and Pradeep and Don, and Bev and other folks, that OCI have done is really profoundly and just incredible. So you got to love what you’re doing, you got to go after that. But there’s a second part to it, which is not just be part of that transformation of celebrity tech. Now go do clever go to market. But it’s also recognize that the only predictable wealth creation event in the tech industry is a turnaround, not an IPO. Not an acquisition of a startup. But a company that has a track record of succeeding the installed base of customers that screwed up their proposition with customers, if you can go fix that, go fix their relationship with partners go fix their relationship with customers, because, hey, the engineers did something really useful and clever, and wonderful. And you can connect those dots. You watch stock prices go from 15 to 85. And from $5 at Citrix to $49. And stuff like that end it becomes a good way to make a living. So, you know, do I advocate people stick with one place and be loyal and climb the corporate ladder? Yes, if there’s a chain of products there and projects that fit that criteria of being interesting, compelling and you know, worth investing your time and energy in but throw yourself into the hard problems that are shaped at the way you can solve them. Like, as I’ve told people, many, many times, the best channel program in the world cannot save shitty code. Click bad products are going to be bad products. But there’s a lot of bad go to markets with really good products tied to them that open up opportunities to go after those. That’s my advice. Vince Menzione 1:03:15 I love it. So insatiably curious, right, and I got that loud and clear, Ross Brown 1:03:19 right? It turned around, that’s the other one in turn around motivated, Vince Menzione 1:03:22 right? And be passionate about the technology or supporting like the bought in like, don’t just go to a company for a paycheck. Ross Brown 1:03:29 By the way, you also have to love it when partners make money. Like I love it. Like after we did deal Reg, I had partners coming to me going like I was trying to figure out how to get out of this. Now I’m trying to figure out where I’m putting the vacation home. Wonderful. Vince Menzione 1:03:41 I love it. I love it. So what an incredible journey you’ve had. And now I understand why you’re where you are right? Because you you are basically building this new thing, right? And when I can’t call Oracle a turnaround, but maybe from a cloud perspective, it is Ross Brown 1:03:55 it’s enough for people to discover new value that we’ve not shown them. That’s a turnaround of a form. Vince Menzione 1:03:59 So I have to ask you, this is like my favorite question I asked every guest right. So you are hosting a dinner party, you can host the center party anywhere in the world. Maybe you’ll even come back down to Florida where you grew up and hosted here, but you can invite any three guests from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Whom would you invite and why? Okay, Ross Brown 1:04:19 and am I also telling you where this dinner is? Absolutely. Okay. So during the pandemic, my wife and I took some time well, right as the pandemic was starting, we took some time before and then started doing some investing in some hospitality businesses. So I’m a proud investor in a restaurant in Woodinville Washington called heritage. I had the opportunity to take one of my ideal dinner guests to before they passed away and he loved it. So my three dinner guests. This is gonna be might get a little emotional here. This is a hard topic for me. My three dinner guests are my father, my grandfather and my great grandfather. Now, I have to explain. None of them are related. So I mean, you My adopted dad adopted me when I was basically 18 months old after he married my mom and has been my dad my entire life he passed away about four years ago, right about two years after we open the restaurant. I’ll start with the oldest one. First, my great grandfather is my mother’s grandfather. He was the CFO at DuPont corporation before it when the munitions contract in World War One, and he at DuPont into the chemical transformation to become a chemical powerhouses, the CFO there, but his bigger thing was he appeared to Pont’s, he convinced Pierre du Pont to put both their money together and go to a leveraged buyout of General Motors. And they took over General Motors and my great grandfather created GM AC, he built the Empire State Building, conceived and financed the entire thing was chairman of the Democratic National Party in 1928. And was a an incredibly innovative investor who did incredibly good work around both developing you know, a lot of the southwest of the United States and Chile and in places like that as a minor, but also embedding in like technology investments around you know, how do you scale GM has 10,000 employees and the invention of the PBX things like that? Vince Menzione 1:06:07 What is his name? Ross Brown 1:06:08 He has a Wikipedia article, if you want to look him up, he’s John Jacob Raskob. Ah, yes, I know his name. Absolutely. He also created a large Catholic charity foundation my family still actively involved in, which is where most of the money went was into charity, which then lead to my grandfather, which was my mother’s father. So not this great grandfather. This is his son in law. He was an Olympian sailor, sailed in the 1928 Olympics, absolutely, unbelievably good business person. He and his brother cornered the market in the Central Valley in 1840s. As a wholesale grocery distributor, they sold their business. And then this is where I get my fascination with channels, distribution businesses, basically distribution, and they understand the mechanics. So after they sold the business in the Coachella Valley, and both of them made several 10s of millions of dollars, they relocated to the East Coast. And you know, both got involved in different investments. My uncle was one of the early investors in Broadway plays like cats and things like that made a ton of money doing that stuff, because he has actually picked good plays instead of bad ones. But my grandfather got involved in Tiffany’s, and he was put on the board of Tiffany’s to help them figure out how do you capitalize on the popularity of the Truman Capote movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and go from being this iconic New York Main Street brand, to being truly on every Main Street as a brand. And so the expansion of Tiffany’s and kind of his insight kind of his version of invent something new was changing Tiffany’s from a collection of in house designers to a house of branded designers like Elsa Peretti, and other folks that they signed to be designers to be able to have enough volume of product to be able to fill every main street in every major US city with a Tiffany’s brand. So that notion of how do you scale a business and go into distribution, that conversation, I want to have a conversation with my great grandfather about the financial models he put in place like GMHC, there was no such thing as consumer credit. The biggest bottleneck to Jim’s growth is nobody could afford to get a car because no banks were loaning money against cars, you had to pay cash for it. And the notion that the asset itself was collateral you could repossess was such a big insight. He invented consumer credit for all intensive purposes, don’t have that conversation. Want to talk to my granddad about you know how he scaled out Tiffany’s and thought about the experience of how do you get a New York experience in Chicago? Okay, that’s not too hard. How do you do that in LA? That’s harder. How do you do that Dallas, and how you get really hard? Like, how do you really convey that experience, right? That conversation want to have it my dad, I learned everything I know about sales from him. He was a stockbroker and financial services, leasing agent and stuff like that, but also one of the best bond Vons and best people to have at a dinner party I’ve ever seen in my life. Vince Menzione 1:08:44 What a wonderful group. Ross, and I know of your great grandfather, because I lived in Wilmington, Delaware area for about 25 years. Yeah. So I lived in the heart of the DuPont Valley. And, yeah, probably it passed by where they lived at one point or another. So just fascinating. And the Empire State Building was just up there a couple years ago. And I remember reading a story. So this is just fascinating. So what a great conversation what a great an amazing guest you’ve been, we’re going to release this as a single episode, because I think just think the conversation, we just can’t break this up. And I’m inviting you back again, we have to do another had to bring you back maybe even on stage at some point. But you know, for our listeners, we’ve got this whole partner ecosystem and world out there. Two questions, right. If organizations want to work with you and your team, how did they do so? And then how do you think they should optimize for their success during what I’m calling this the time of tectonic shifts? Ross Brown 1:09:38 So gage with me and my team is super easy. My email is ross.brown@oracle.com. So drop me a note. If you want to get together and go direct to somebody on the team, it could pick it up. Alternatively, if you were interested in what I was talking about on the OCI differences, if you go to my LinkedIn page, there is a public post that as a nine page white paper that I wrote, so it’s not somebody from marketing, actually me that I use As a pre brief for partners before we get together so that their technical teams can read about what’s different in a narrative format that’s easy to absorb and stuff. So if you want to see those, by all means go there. The second part in terms of how to plan success, these tectonic shifts, there’s a short version of it, there’s a long version of the short version of it is very directive, which is show up and do something valuable. Stop telling people that you’re going to someday do something valuable. Like if you sign the video, then I’ll do something valuable, like clouds are experiential. And they’re problem solving platforms and machines solve the problem, like solve a small problem, but get permission to solve big problems, but go in and reasonably price but don’t swing for the ankles on every single pitch to every customer. Like think of it not as and this is the, the biggest thing I try to get across to people, it gets to behavioral stuff, and not like the technology and stuff. But stop thinking like this is a winner take all giant, I got to close the big deal, steak dinner type sale, this is a every day I show up and do something of value and they consume more. And as a result that consumption drives incentives that consumption drives billable hours for my team, but show up and do something valuable. And you will find a path to value that I can’t begin to describe it. It’s like you’re suddenly going like my business was falling apart and the customers are all moving to the cloud. They’re no longer letting me colo stuff for them. And I can’t figure out how to sell Dell equipment anymore. I don’t know where the margins gone on selling, you know, storage devices and I don’t know what to do. Go to your customers and stop telling them what you have. And start asking them what they need. And I guarantee you, it’ll be verbs, not nouns, it’ll be things they need done, not things they need to buy. So listen to the verbs and go show up and do the verb things with them. Do something valuable. But that’s the shift is stop thinking and things start thinking and verbs. But what actions do you need to do for your customer to succeed? Vince Menzione 1:11:47 Ross, you’ve been an amazing guest. I want to thank you for your time today. You’re generous. I know how busy you are. You’re generous amount of time. And thank you for being an amazing guest on Ultimate Guide to partner. No worries. Thanks, Ross Brown 1:11:59 Vince. Appreciate the time. Announcer 1:12:03 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner. We’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering

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