IT landscape shifting to outcomes in AI push

Partners should be paying attention to the IT landscape’s shift away from infrastructure and towards outcomes, with AI playing an important role, according to Google Cloud Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) head of partners and alliances Gary Denman.

Denman spoke to ARN ahead of the vendor’s Summit event in Sydney on 30 July, noting that customers want their outcomes solved, and they’re looking for others to provide the technology to do so.

“They’re not looking to try and create infrastructure in the way that they were historically,” he said.

“They have this challenge now around needing to do more with less time and resources, so they don’t have the capacity to deal with thousands and thousands of services; they’re looking for platforms, and then what they’re really uncovering … is AI.

“There’s a really interesting opportunity for businesses around AI; the realisation is that you need to have your data at the centre of your business.”

As a result, Denman said Google Cloud is hearing demand from customers to become data centred who are desiring “true partnerships”.

“We need to spend a lot of time understanding the capabilities and the types of requirements that customers are looking for,” he said.

“Then we map that and spend a lot of time with our channel partners to identify where they are best placed to make their investments to be able to deliver the outcomes that they think they’re best placed to do.”

Denman also said Google Cloud’s sales teams spend time “really trying to understand how we can bring the most valuable partners to the request of our customers”.

The end result, he noted, was that customers get to their desired outcome as fast as possible, while service partners generate revenues quickly. In turn, Google Cloud starts to see the rewards on consumption.

Agentic AI is particularly in demand from customers, and Denman said it’s up to partners to make the most of this demand.

“One of the things we see is the more you use the tools, the more you understand how valuable they can be, so that’s certainly a very key theme — enablement of the channel for this agentic era,” he said.

“What we’re hearing from our customers is they’re going to make those agentic decisions and strategies, and they’re looking to Google — they see us as the pioneer in that. We’ve always had AI as the centre of our capability; partners need to be able to respond to that.”

Tapping into true partners

In regards to what makes a “true partnership”, Denman said in his opinion it comes from partners giving customers more than what they ask for and engaging in additional work following the culmination of an existing project.

“As they build, we talk about that flywheel effect you can have inside a customer. That is evidence of true partnership,” he said. “I don’t know many organisations that choose to spend with people that don’t deliver for them; they spend with people who do deliver for them. That, to me, is a symbolic way of partnership.

“You test the partnership at the point of a difficult conversation, and how you lean into resolution is always the best example of when a partnership is working well, whether that’s a change in strategy, whether it’s a change in situation inside an organisation where a project needs a little bit of refinement — that’s where you see true partnership.”

Denman also said these trusted partners are seeing a rise in long-term customers coming to them to take on new projects with Google Cloud.

“They’re coming with customers that they’ve already been serving for a number of years around different technologies into our portfolio,” he said.

“Our role there is to ensure that they build the capabilities and understanding of our technologies as associated from a differentiation from the technologies they’ve provided historically.

“What we’re seeing now with the demand in the market is that there is opportunity for partners, and I don’t think that creates a capacity overrun for us as we continue to accelerate and build backlog for delivery.”

As such, Denman added that Google Cloud is encouraging partners to collaborate with the hyperscaler during the sales cycle, coming together to cosell.

“It’s really important that we jointly, where appropriate, work together with the customer to deliver the outcome,” he said. “They’re leading that from a delivery standpoint.

“We want them to be successful and profitable so that they can reinvest and continue to build services and repeatability into other customers as well.”