Episode 39: Google Wants YOU
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Erick and Rich discuss why the time for MSPs to get serious about online marketplaces is now and three tips for managing growth. Then Rich is joined by Colleen Kapase, Google’s global channel chief, and Sharon Prosser, Google’s VP of SMB cloud sales, for a view from atop one of the world’s largest tech companies on the opportunity for MSPs in AI. And finally, one last thing: Hellmann’s says everything’s better with mayonnaise, including cologne.
Discussed in this episode:
Canalys: Hyperscaler cloud marketplace sales to hit US$85 billion by 2028
Google Partner Advantage website
Hellmann’s Mayo Cologne Is Enjoyable For All The Wrong Reasons
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m Chief Content Officer and Channel Analyst at Channel Master, the organization responsible for the show. I am joined by your other co host our Chief Strategist at Channel Master, Erick Simpson.
Erick, how you doing? Doing great, Rich. How are you doing in this news filled week? Doing well also is there a duller topic to bring up than the weather? The weather is not very summery here in Seattle, but other than that I’m doing great. Awesome. Glad to hear it. And I know that the the news that we’re going to cover, the story of the week.
Has something to do with something that we’ve talked about once or twice on the program before am I right? You are absolutely right and let’s dive into our story of the week In fact regular listeners and viewers will recall just a few episodes ago We interviewed Carol in April of CompTIA at the chow con show and she was telling us about a panel She moderated in which Rob Ray Of PAX 8 said, don’t call us a distributor anymore.
Call us a marketplace. And that is a reflection of a trend in the industry. And our friends at Canalys. The analyst organization published some data this week that really under scores the scale, the size, the sweep of that transformation going on in the industry right now. What did they reveal?
They revealed that hyperscaler cloud marketplaces, so think AWS Azure, Google. They’re generating about 16 billion or excuse me, past temps generated about 16 billion worth of transactions in 2023 by 2028. That’s going to be up to 85 billion. So this is, hockey stick kind of growth basically for transactions going on through marketplaces.
And, we’ve spoken before about one of the reasons for that. People want. That sort of tap, click, friction free purchasing experience that they’ve gotten used to from their, the rest of their life on, you want to order a pizza or you need a park for your car you’re reserving a seat on a flight.
You can do that with your phone on your thumb and it’s all very quick and easy and painless. Why is purchasing software and hardware so much harder? So that is certainly part of it. This set of. End user expectations. That’s pushing folks to the the marketplaces. But there’s another that we really haven’t spoken about enough on the show here Erick, that can house really calls attention to, and that is cloud credits.
AWS and and Microsoft in particular have been for a long time selling credits in advance on cloud consumption to their buyers. And you buy in advance, you get a discount. Businesses are sitting on a collective 360 billion worth of cloud credits right now across the hyperscaler marketplaces.
And, the, these purchases are non returnable basically. Once you bought the capacity, you really need to do something with it. And so that too is driving a lot of businesses to the marketplaces. We’ve already spent. Money for capacity. We’re not using let’s put that money to work, particularly at a time when the economy has a lot of businesses being cautious about budgets.
So maybe I can’t get I, fresh new it dollars from the boss right now. Not a problem. I’ve got all this cloud credit money sitting in my digital wallet as it were, I’m going to go out and spend out of that. So we are going to see we’re already seeing a lot of activity flowing through marketplaces.
We’re going to see more and more of that by 2027. Canalis says about half. Of marketplace sales will flow through the channel. So this is very much a channel phenomenon and all of the hyperscalers have created mechanisms to make it easier for channel partners to be a piece of these transactions that otherwise would just be end user to to vendor.
And already actually two thirds of partners out there are seeing their customers do business on marketplaces. So it’s not as if this is something that’s happening in the shadows that MSPs haven’t noticed. They know this is going on, but Erick, and I think we have spoken about this before on the show.
They’re a little bit. Nervous about it because they are used to providing white glove service [00:05:00] and taking care of things like purchasing for their customers. They are nervous about what happens when empowered customers doing self serve transactions on marketplaces buy all the wrong stuff. And you, the MSP is now responsible for managing and securing all of this.
And Canalys is very much seeing this as well in its data. And they point to part of what they say in response to that is they point to distributors. And I know Pax8 doesn’t want to be called a distributor, but in this context I’ll do that to distinguish them from these hyperscaler marketplaces because at the Pax8 Beyond conference in June that we both attended Pax8 officially rolled out their new marketplace of the future.
And one of the really interesting things that they did with that was build functionality in there that would give partners some control over how that self serve marketplace purchasing experience works for. Their customers. So you can limit which vendors and products your customers have access to.
You can, if you really don’t want customers doing any purchasing without you being aware, you can let them shop and put stuff in the cart and say, I want to buy this. And that order flows to you before it actually flows to PAX 8. I want to broaden this out a little bit just to say that Canalys research is principally about the hyperscale marketplaces, but distributors all have marketplaces to the stuff that Pax 8 is doing is stuff that other distributors are doing or will be doing shortly.
And so that it for those MSPs out there who are nervous about. Transacting through the marketplaces. There is an alternative to the hyperscale marketplaces out there, but I will just say, as we’ve said before on the show, Erick, the option I think you don’t have is to simply say, I’m not playing. I don’t like marketplaces.
I’m not going to be a part of that because that’s where the business is going. That’s where your customers are going. And to the degree that you’re not going there too, you’re at risk of becoming irrelevant. I couldn’t agree more, Rich. And it reminds me. You bring up this the fear.
And potential sense of risk that MSPs have when clients start buying their own stuff. I experienced this back in, in my MSP days when we had our MSP was like the clients would invariably buy things from distributors or vendors directly Dell, HP, you name it, and the products would show up.
We’d have no idea. And they’d say, Hey, can you come set it up and come to find out that. It was the wrong choice. Like the, the hardware was not correct. It was either underpowered or wouldn’t integrate with something else, or the license for the operating system was some home version, that we could not integrate into, the Microsoft.
Active directory and all this stuff. So I experienced this fear and we were very challenged at, managing some of our more kind of out of the box thinking clients, ordering stuff all the time. All, cell phones and everything. Hey, can you, but no, we don’t support that kind of stuff.
So I like the idea that Pax8 is creating this opportunity rich for clients and users to fill up a cart and then have some sort of an approval review process for the MSPs that serve them to do that. And this requires MSPs to partner with Pax8 and other distributors that have this functionality and teach and train their clients.
That are apt to do these things in the right way. And I know that there’s capabilities where, we can build kind of our ideal package for a new user, for instance Rich, we did this back in my MSP, like we had set things up with an artist at the time was Ingram. So we’d have the pack, the bundle was like for an entry level, like admin person, they’d have, this capability from a laptop or a desktop and things like that with these software licenses and the power user would have a different one and things like that.
But I think the challenge, Rich, becomes when clients go beyond and outside of these preferred distribution partners or marketplaces that the MSP, can manage. And they just, get the idea that they want something. Somebody comes in, they say, yeah, let’s buy this. So there’s still this opportunity for MSPs to add value.
I don’t, from where I’m sitting today, I may regret this a few years from now saying this, Rich, but I don’t see. MSPs completely ceding all control to a client because then they begin to lose that one value that only they can provide, which is that consultative strategic value in guiding these technology [00:10:00] decisions and purchases.
I could be wrong, Rich. And I hope I am partially because this makes it a lot easier and more efficient for clients and partners to manage. Their infrastructure and licensing purchases. If there is this oversight and strategic collaboration and guidance that occurs there and that’s where I think the MSPs need to move toward in order to continue to add the value and away from, being the.
The pizza delivery person for the next laptop, if you will. Yeah. A few thoughts on that. First of all I think if there were going to be any takeaways a key takeaway from this conversation here is you need to start thinking about a process, a workflow, how you’re going to handle this problem.
Again I think, if marketplaces are an inevitability, so you need to come up with a way that is going to be good for the appealing to the end user, but also allow you to remain relevant and provide good service. And so it could, I’m not saying this is the preferred way, but it could be the kind of thing where when you’re onboarding a customer you let them know.
One of the services I provide is helping you with purchasing. Anytime you have a purchase to make, let’s talk about it. And then you work it out, but to the degree the customer wants to just do that on their own, on the marketplace, then you let them do that. Now related thought I was saying, look at distributor.
Sort of channel friendly channel first distributor marketplaces as a way to work through some of these issues here But of course that 360 billion dollars worth of cloud credits are on the hyperscale marketplaces. So you may not have the option of steering people to Pax8 and companies like it.
But in that case one thing that you can do, and I know there are plenty of companies that do it, is you can, assuming the customer is okay with this, they like the way that it sounds, you can have that purchasing conversation with the customer. They say, yeah, that’s good. Let’s do it. And then you go into the marketplace on the cloud.
On their behalf and spend their credits, and that, that becomes the way that you’re helping them take advantage of those platforms. So there are a lot of different ways to do it. You’re right. There are a lot of legitimate questions to ask. I just think people need to figure out how they’re going to deal with this issue as opposed to whether or not they deal with it.
Yeah. We’ve got to deal with it. That’s the takeaway here. Let’s talk about something else you got to deal with here as we move to your tip of the week and talk about good problems to have, Erick. How about managing growth? Yes, another example ripped from the headlines for the tip of the week, this week, rich, working with a a consulting client of mine and they’re experiencing the, the pain of the growth pains that every business experiences happens to be, we’re talking about MSPs here, so they’re experiencing growth pains and areas of people and staffing.
Process and platform optimization, configuration, integration, and then measuring and forecasting and capacity planning for continued growth. So three quick ideas to share. They fall within the categories of. Scalable infrastructure, process standardization, and then performance measurement and scalability forecasting.
The first one, scalable infrastructure, which this is nothing new. I hope to the MSPs in our audience is understanding that they have to have the capacity from an infrastructure perspective, from a platform perspective. From a training and documentation perspective to scale to grow, meaning the choke point that a lot of MSPs experience when they begin selling more and have a much higher level of success at closing sales because they’ve been, they’ve achieved a higher level of maturity there.
The choke point being the onboarding process for new clients. And then once they get through the onboarding process, It’s the ongoing support and delivery of services to those clients. So from a scalable infrastructure perspective, we’re talking about the ability to deliver service to these clients.
Number one, from a hybrid perspective, I know that a lot of MSPs, Rich have the mindset that, hey, I need everyone in the office to work and deliver service. And my clients, I tend to lean in that direction as well, because I know the value of having the service desk team in one area in a bowl, and it certainly accelerates cross training and collaboration and things like that.
But I do know that there are other MSPs that, that I know of that [00:15:00] have more of a hybrid philosophy about this. Some of it is halftime in the office, halftime, at home. Three days in the office, two days out, and we know that because of the cost of labor for talent today, rich, we have some MSPs that have a portion, if not all of their technical teams completely remote.
And this may be in North America, maybe internationally. We’re seeing. The capability to support clients a completely different opportunity to do that today than maybe we felt comfortable doing 15 years ago, for instance, right? The world is catching up and we’re able to leverage these folks.
So how do we scale our internal? infrastructure to support everybody, meaning that everybody has the equipment platforms they need, access they need. And then how do we support the hybrid folks from a security perspective, from a platform perspective, from a collaboration perspective. We’ve talked rich about some of the challenges on other episodes of just keeping the teams, in tune.
Motivated, right? Their performance being measured. So the delivering service at a very high level of performance, as close as we can get to having everybody in the office and things like that. So thinking about scaling the infrastructure to support all these types of service delivery models, and then to support the way that our clients have their distributed aims, locations, and hybrid workforces as well.
Number one tip. Number two, the one that we always talk about rich. process standardization. This particular client I’m working with right now they are busting at the seams in terms of growth, but what’s stymieing them from scaling efficiently and it’s costing them more in labor is because they still have a lot of work to do in standardizing and documenting their processes.
And not only that, Rich, But identifying and documenting the roles of every member of the team so that we’re not trying to figure out who’s got the ball over here. I thought that was your responsibility and having a real effective way to understand who’s responsible for what. We’re directing the tickets to the appropriate resources that have been trained and have the documentation.
And the process is documented so they can knock out those tickets and not sending, level one tickets to level three technicians, for instance, which would be our most costly service that we deliver to anybody and vice versa, not sending tickets to a level one engineering you. I don’t have the ability to solve those tickets and need and work on it for a while and escalate it back out again.
Number three, growth forecasting. Do we know when to hire the next resource in the organization? This extends beyond service, rich, like from a service perspective, I’ll take that first. How many clients or end users can we support with our existing staff? How many tickets? Are we analyzing to say, Hey, we, from a typical client, maybe it’s 20 users, 50 years, a hundred users, what kinds of tickets are they generating based upon different things?
Their maturity level, are they noisy clients? Are they the typical client? And then how many tickets end up in level one, 97, 98 percent easy, rich. That’s what my experience tells me. And statistics tell us I’m, I come from enterprise with some of this data. Building out call centers and service tests.
This is what we track 98%, maybe level one, maybe more if we can get it. These are the tickets that we can close within that first call resolution, because we’re not sending level two tickets to level one. So we can generate that type of performance. How long does it take? How many tickets can a level one technician close per day when they have the proper infrastructure support, capacity planning, and process standardization, same thing with level two and level three, So when we bring on a new client, how many new clients can we bring on without having to scale our services?
Not only with service delivery, but hey, sales engineering, BCIL roles, sales. Are we, do we have more capacity than sales? That means that we have more service and more Capacity to serve more clients, but we haven’t filled that need for bringing on new clients. So now we look at our sales process and our sales tools and, do we need to hire more salespeople to serve our needs?
So three quick tips all around helping us manage growth and grow in a consistent, scalable, predictable manner. That’s the key. I know we have spoken about this before. I don’t know if we’ve spoken about it on the podcast, but I wrote an article once upon a time about the the characteristics that the [00:20:00] fastest growing MSPs in the industry have in common.
And actually originally it was I call the the answers, the three S’s more recently I’ve added a fourth, so it’s now four S’s. And the, the newest addition to the list is let’s call it strategery the ability to think strategically about I. T. and how it can help your customers.
Specialization is another one. Pick a vertical or two, pick a technology, CRM, whatever it is. And specialize, that’s going to help you grow further and faster. But the other two S’s on that list are both on your list here. And that’s standardization and scalability. And building those into I. T.
Everything that you do at the company to the maximum degree possible. I have found through the years consistently companies that do those four things very much including standardization and scalability outgrow the competition and do it much more profitably, I would probably, I would add to that.
Yeah. Great. Four S’s. All right. So now we have. Even more fodder for more tips of the week, as we might be unpacking each one of those over in the next series of podcasts, rich, let’s do that. Let’s do that. Absolutely. But for now let’s take a break. We’ll be back in just a moment when we do return or actually I will return.
Erick has to take a break. We are going to bring you an interview segment recorded earlier when Erick was I believe leading a webinar and unable to join in. Folks, we have had some pretty exciting interview guests on this podcast and it’s brief life all sorts of C suite executives from global businesses, channel chiefs.
But we may be hitting a new peak here cause we’re about to be joined after the break by Colleen Copsey. She is the global channel chief for Google. One of those hyper scalers we were just talking about. We will also be joined by Sharon Prosser who runs SMB sales for the Google cloud unit.
They’re going to be talking with us about opportunities in AI opportunities around workspace. Efforts that google has underway to help its partners capitalize on those opportunities. Very interesting conversation and it all begins in just a moment
and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment, and my, oh my, we’ve have done ourselves at MSP chat here because we have two phenomenal guests for you on the show to talk about AI and the office productivity, partner programs, a bunch of other great stuff.
They are Colleen Copsey. Who is the vice president of channels and partner programs at Google, otherwise known as the global channel chief and Sharon Prosser. She is the vice president of Google cloud SMB sales and scaled acquisition. Colleen, Sharon, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having us.
I’m so glad to be here. It’s a pleasure to see you again.
Yes, yeah, we met at Google Cloud Next just a few months ago, and I appreciate you making some time to come on the show. Just to kick things off, go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience, Colleen.
Colleen: Yeah, Colleen Copsey. I’ve been at Google for a little under a year now.
Time’s flown, it’s gone fast. And been in partnering my whole career. It’s been amazing here running through the channel evolution here, the programs, the incentives and really the center and the heart of what makes partners tick. And I’ve been working with one of my esteemed colleagues here, Sharon.
Yeah, excellent. Hi, Rich and Sharon Prosser. I, as you said I am part of the, s and B sales leadership team here for Google Cloud and just jazz to be in this conversation. We’re talking about three of my favorite things, S and B’s partners. Looking forward to the conversation. Let’s let’s start with a discussion topic that’ll cover both SMBs and AI.
Colleen, I’ll start with you. What is the opportunity right now for managed service providers in that SMB segment around artificial intelligence?
Colleen: Oh, such a great question. And I know there’s just a lot of conversations going around. AI, and I think a lot of folks view that, AI was in a visionary state.
And I think, I hear from myself and Sharon that we’re seeing this in production state. Customers are most definitely using AI to catch that edge against their competition to just move things forward for a great ROI perspective as well. But the reality is AI is moving fast. I think we’re all seeing that the large language models are developing.
And certainly Gemini is now off the charts. Just doing amazing and really finding itself at the top of many charts. And that’s been a journey for us here at Google, but when it comes to large language models and what to use, when to [00:25:00] use, what’s the best performance, what’s the best that has the edge from the industry that I particularly in that can be a moving target for a lot of customers.
So having a partner play a services role, if you will, in ensuring that they’re making sure that the best model is being used most cost efficiency for the best results with the best training in mind is something I think a lot of customers are looking for guidance for. And so that’s the opportunity to have that MSP mindset, if you will, provide that feedback.
Holistic service offering to our customers. And I think it’s a lot, it’s a new area. AI is a new area for a lot of folks. And if I was a partner, it is something I would be investing probably pretty heavily in. And I think even more so in the SMB space, they’re looking for that total solution, that total offering being provided that them take a bit of the risk out of it too, and just ensure they’re getting the best productivity for their dollar with the highest ROI.
Yes, Sharon. You folks are seeing actual production deployments of AI specifically in SMB. What kind of use cases, workloads are catching on early? Yeah, and as Colleen shared, there, there’s been this, evolution of AI and how to think about it. If you think of, when it all kicked off really heartily back in say 2023, a lot of curiosity amongst SMBs, what is this AI thing?
How do I how can I drive outcomes? With A. I. And we are seeing as we’ve moved, from that state of curiosity to businesses putting it to use. And some of the more common use cases that we’re seeing across SMBs are focused around creating personalized customer experiences.
So think about chatbots or looking for efficiency and agility across their data and their processes. Think about SMBs that have, maybe a offline document system that they’re or process that they’re working on. With today with customers and the ability to digitize that and then use that data to derive insights and take action against that.
So that’s a common use case that we see. And then there’s Customers that are looking at they’ve got a lot of data and they’re looking for A. I. To help them with spotting trends and patterns within that data and being able to more quickly draw insights and actions from that. So those are probably the three buckets of opportunity that we see most common among amongst SMBs today.
So Colleen, MSPs love project revenue. They love consulting revenue. A lot of what Sharon is talking about there there will be a one time thing, helping the end user identify a good way to get started. Get that solution up and running. What MSPs especially love, though, is monthly recurring revenue, so in addition to the, that project work, that consulting work, that implementation work, is there an MRR opportunity around artificial intelligence for MSPs, too?
Colleen: Yeah I think that’s a good question. It’s not necessarily sold like a SaaS product. It’s not software it’s definitely more of a cloud Sales process, but it does have the reoccurring piece of it’s a service And so there is that reoccurring services opportunity And so there’s definitely from a Google perspective, we have all sorts of incentives focused around consumption and usage.
And I think that’s pretty healthy in terms of, it’s not like a subscription renewal where you’re paying more on the renewal process. From a monthly standpoint, it is the more you’re using the more incentives that are out there and we’re looking for growth. We’re looking for additional workloads and using AI.
So if you have a service and it’s supporting perhaps the marketing team and then there’s a new workload at the finance team or the supply chain management team. That’s something that we’re rewarding for as well on that a reoccurring basis. So I get it. We, MMR, MRR makes it just, it’s a predictable business.
And I think we’re taking that into consideration when we’re looking at the economics of how can we reward partners for doing more? I also think there’s a services mentality back to the customer too. AI is here to stay, but it is, it’s not. It’s ever changing and evolving probably faster than I’ve seen a lot of technology trends in the past.
I think this is evolving faster and improving more. And so I think there is a reoccurring services engagement too. It’s not a one time put it in and run. I think there’s a constant tuning, constant training, constant evolution. So I also think there’s that [00:30:00] continuous services opportunities with customers there as well.
Yeah. Forgive me if I’m misremembering, but I think the last time we spoke, there were actually, you were talking about incentives before. There were some pretty aggressive incentives in place around AI.
Colleen: Oh, yeah. One of them is specifically around Gemini for Workspace. And I’ll tell you what, since we last spoke I think myself and Sharon have been really excited with how this is really taking off.
We certainly see, one of the first places that individual may experience AI in the workplace is through their collaboration apps. I’m, I’ve been loving using Workspace here at Google. Pleasantly surprised with the increase in productivity I’ve even seen personally. And part of that is using Gemini from an AI perspective, whether it’s helping summarization, helping create documents, slide creation, pulling data into slides in just such a more simplistic way than I’ve ever seen in the past.
And I think a lot of business users are looking for how can we get more out of our existing employees, if you will. And. We’ve seen Gemini and we have a lot of partners, frankly, that use Workspace and are now using Gemini and they personally are seeing increased productivity, time savings and huge ROI with that.
So on an incentive standpoint. We moved some of our incentives to really focus on winning both new customers and expanding into products like Gemini. And I’ve been really excited to see how many partners have come along on that journey. Doing multimillion dollar Gemini attached sales to existing workspace customers, and frankly, just winning more workspace customers from a new perspective who are looking at the combination between workspace and Gemini and I think this is what I want to use to run my team and my business on. But I’ve been hearing back quite a bit from our partners going, wow we’re getting up to, when you add it up between getting new customers and expansion and discounts, it’s almost a 60 percent reward on driving that Gemini with Workspace.
And sometimes partners are, I’ve heard it all, who knows. And as they’re closing some of these deals to coming back, going, wow, Colleen, actually, this is incredibly profitable. This is great. I’m reorienting my entire sales team to run this Gemini and Workspace play. And, that’s just music to my ears.
I love hearing that. Share it. Can
I just make one, one point off of what Colleen has shared. And I the, I think the secret ingredient. For partners that can be really effective with SMBs, are those that have adopted, Workspace plus Gemini within their own organizations, and we do have a benefit available to partners for them to get access to Gemini and what it does is that even within their own organization, they’re able to develop use cases and just reach a level of comfort in how to talk about where Gemini shows up, in the business.
And and that’s the differentiator I see when a partner goes into talk with a customer. It’s that Their own personal experience using Workspace and Gemini themselves. And for those partners that, are considering, running this as a focus area.
I’d really look at, how can they get Workspace plus Gemini in their own organization. That might be a great segue to something I wanted to ask about, which is just in your experience, Sharon, how prepared, how ready is the average IT provider who serves SMBs to have a serious Gemini or just AI conversation with that SMB customer how ready are they to do that?
How much work is involved in getting ready? Yeah, and we see partners, showing up, at different levels of understanding as Colleen said, it is a fast moving space. There’s, it’s constantly evolving. We do have some, I would say, some very progressive partners that have they’ve They’ve gotten certified.
They’re taking advantage of our trainings. They’re running hackathons and workshops with their prospective customers. And they’re really on the leading edge of bringing a level of expertise to the table. And then, we’ve got that next tranche of customer partners, excuse me, that I think still need to
dedicate some time to getting certified and Sort of anchoring on a use case or two that they can bring into a customer conversation to inspire that customer.
The one advice I give partners is don’t come in with a blank sheet. SMB already has a blank sheet that they’re working, that they’re staring at. They need you to come in and give them some inspiration around a business case, have outcomes associated with it to really motivate them to move forward.
Colleen: Yeah, I, and on that, Rich, like one of the things I [00:35:00] love about Google is it’s teaching culture and we’ve developed a learning path for partners getting started at the 100 level all the way up to like very serious practitioners at the 400 level, if you will, to give them a path of how to
get started with AI, how to learn.
They want to branch off and have expertise in a specific area, whether it’s search using AI, whether it’s contact center using AI these are all paths that are there so the partner really take advantage of and sometimes it’s for minimal investment, other than the people, the talent showing up and taking the training.
I love that about Google.
Rich: Are there other? I know, and I want to get into this some a little bit later in the conversation. I know there’s work underway at Google on the partner program there beyond the certifications and the training. Are there other resources? Other things you’re doing in the partner program to enable partners around AI?
Colleen: Come on, Rich. It wouldn’t be a good channel leader if I wasn’t coming in here and redoing the program. And I gotta be honest. I’m, I, we are very heads down right now. I think next coming up the following April of 2025 is going to be a really exciting time for us to share more details around that, but I’ll tell you what services and how to engage with services.
And it’s at the core of everything we’re thinking about from our program. So I think you’re community rich. It’s who I’m waking up and who we’re thinking about and how are we having MSP services? How are we having professional services delivered? How are we driving those workloads? How do we ensure that we’re working together on those deals?
How are we rewarding it? How are we helping fund it? These are the questions that I’m working, waking up and thinking about every day and we’re very much reorienting for that mindset. I’m excited about it. More, more to come. I will tell you. We’re able to probably move faster than I’m used to for this size of a company because we’re using AI in our development process as well.
So whether it’s some of the coding that we’re doing to relook at our programs whether it’s using it to help create knowledge bases for our partners that’s exciting, not just talking about it, but actually being a consumer and user of AI. Ourselves. This is pretty it’s groundbreaking.
It’s different.
Rich: As I’m sure you’re aware for any podcast that’s talking to an MSP audience, a lot of the folks who are listening and watching right now, Are part of the Microsoft ecosystem. They’re invested in Microsoft 365 and co pilot. When you’re having conversations with partners about why they should the, or the advantages to them of going with Google and workspace and Gemini in addition, or instead, what’s the argument for somebody who’s thinking the.
The low hanging fruit, the easy path into AI is through the Microsoft stuff that I already know pretty well. Yeah. I’ll touch on a few things there because we have this conversation a lot. Customers are using what they use today and working to come over to Google Workspace.
And we’re having, again, a lot of these conversations. It’s around security. Knowing that Google places security as a highly important aspect to anything they bring to market. And that is a real differentiator with respect to Google Workspace and frankly, all of our products. And so that, that’s a something that we talk a lot about with customers looking to make the move.
Secondly, it’s it’s the ease of use. products in combination with Gemini. We get a lot of feedback from existing customers on how much they like it. It’s intuitive. They don’t have to spend as much time with change management across, their employees. Frankly, a lot of their employees have Google Workspace experience from, their personal life or maybe as they, they went to school.
And there’s a lot of built in knowledge around how to use Workspace and the various tools and makes employees happy. And that’s, SMBs want happy employees and they want retention. And those are two of the factors that come up a lot. A lot and really are really nice anchoring points for our new workspace customers had
Colleen: I think I certainly talk to partners quite a bit, I’ll be honest.
I think there’s been some recent changes. I’m noticing a lot of partners are coming proactively to us as well. Looking for an alternative option. That I don’t think we expected. But it’s open arms for sure. Rich. And I think, we’ve seen Microsoft with their productivity apps and AI attached, but what I, the conversation we’re having with partners is, and we’ve done a lot of talking about workspace.
Workspace. But AI is ubiquitous through the entire portfolio of offerings. So whether you’re looking at. Our Google cloud offerings and just the pure infrastructure, the [00:40:00] security space, which I think is still very strong. Also MSP opportunity as well. We’ve come up with a security MSP program as well.
Where you’re providing that services as an option. AI is embedded through all of it. And so I think when partners see the opportunity beyond the collaboration ops. Apps of, Vertex and Search. One of the things I’ve learned and this sounds so simple, but it actually was an aha moment for me, AI and search are completely interlinked.
When you’re looking at a lot of your experiences online, it’s how are you searching visually for things, not just using text. And that’s really revolutionized speed in which you can find information and specificness of what you can buy products and different things as well. So having AI into our vertex offering into our cloud infrastructure all the way down to the chip in our security portfolio, that’s something that partners are seeing the opportunity with, and they’re seeing the aha moment.
of the businesses that they can create, whether it’s around collaboration or those other areas. And you don’t see a lot of people just taking a security space as an example of rewarding for discounting, if you will. Nobody’s winning a decision within a company about, wow, so sorry about that.
But Issue that we had, but I got a good deal on it. Security is you put in your frankly, your career at risk in many areas there. And so seeing what we’re able to offer with our Mandiant portfolio with the Chronicle offerings and how we’re embedding AI in that house, interlinking with workspaces, interlinking with our infrastructure.
Partners see that opportunity and they’re jumping on board. I don’t know if I’ve seen. Our increase in partner numbers spike this much, but we are certainly seeing quite a few spikes. And I’ll say too, Rich, if there’s some folks out there going Oh maybe it’s too late. Maybe I’m not getting there in time.
Others have gone before me. I think this is very early days. And with our birthright of AI here at Google and with search here I think we have a lot of plans in store, a lot of amazing things at SMB. It’s one of those great opportunities in front of us where we’ve had some progress, yes, but there’s.
There’s many more years to come of a very strong business here.
Sharon, you a few moments ago mentioned a lot of people encountering Workspace for the first time in school. And I think anyone with kids is familiar with how widely used Workspace and Chromebooks are in the education vertical.
That might be a good example of something I wanted to ask about, which is just untapped, underappreciated opportunities for the folks in our audience around Workspace out there right now. Yeah. We have 10 million customers on Workspace, but I am an optimist at heart. I also covered this amazing space called SMB, which is vast.
And so there continues to be. opportunity to tap into certain verticals. I’m not responsible for higher ed, so I can’t speak to that directly, but just, overall, it is a vast universe. And we continue to believe that new account acquisition and driving, more usage of workspace is clearly an opportunity and we’re going to continue to invest in it.
Colleen: I think too, there, especially for the SMB space that can be a slightly more. Price sensitive slightly. We saw this proliferation through COVID of these different tools. We would use one video tool, a different chat tool, a different email tool. Workspace has all of that in a single console.
You’re not slipping between three tools. And that’s, what’s helping our AI to get more powerful, bringing all of that information in to help people. Synthesize meetings and notes and help spin up emails for you automatically and bringing content. And I think that from an SMB message, it resonates for all people, but it’s really resonating in the SMB space of bringing those tools, one pricing structure, one area to have all that data.
Cause our emails and our chats, there’s data in there too. It says important information. And so I think that’s really resonating with partners and customers alike. Yeah,
I would agree. Cost optimization. I haven’t met an SMB customer that doesn’t have that goal in mind. And I think when you look at the real estate of the other tools that they might have in place there’s a great opportunity to show value in a, in an improved, total cost of ownership by just tallying up all the annual subscription fees of all those other products and then compare that to a workspace.
So there’s a great value message there in the frame of cost optimization. So Colleen, I, I want to take a step back because as you [00:45:00] said you’re coming up hard on, on your one year anniversary in this role at Google. How would you describe your mission in relation to Google and the channel when you stepped into the role and as, as that anniversary comes up where are you on that mission, on that journey?
Colleen: Yeah great question because I definitely feel I am here for a reason for sure. And first and foremost, it’s driving a services mindset here for our partners which again, I think, Votes well for the community that you’re really constantly speaking with it, I am here because of AI.
I came from a previous place that had a data background. So I spent five years really learning a ton about data. And when I saw AI emerge. To me, I knew this wasn’t going to be a short term trend. This was going to be something that’s going to be revolutionary.
Much like
Colleen: mobile, much like online. And so I’m here to be part of that.
I’m here to use AI. I’m here to make partner experts in AI and in data. But from a services perspective, I think that’s the true value that we can see. I think that’s what customers want, gone are the days where we can sell large licenses and just walk away from a customer. I think we’ve all, even customer success teams to completely change.
Some organizations don’t even have them. The sales process is a longer process of landing product and then ensuring product is used. But every day we need partners to show up to be part of that process too. There is value there. We, if you’re not using a product at the end of the day, you’re not valued and in these economic times, that giving customer delight is so important.
So I’m here to make sure that we’re supporting partners on that services journey in those services offerings. We’re valuing it, we’re measuring it. We’re rewarding it, we’re getting the tools, delivering navigator. I love that tool. All of our PSO IP going into a tool that’s searchable using AI tools for partners that have training here to develop their services practices.
I think for a long time partner, we as partner practitioners have spoken about the rise of services and the importance of services. And that time is now. And so supporting that with programs and incentives and tools is, it’s just what I’m here to keep transforming and moving Google into the future.
And they have the tech, the technologies undeniably some of the best technology in the world supporting AI. So now putting those partner programs, incentives and tools to support our partners on that journey is my mission statement.
It, it sounds you are actively recruiting new partners into Google to create a services arm in support of AI.
Colleen: Absolutely. You bet. And bringing them on that journey from the training perspective, and I think this happens from S& B, up all the way to enterprise, but there’s no S& B leader that’s Hey, I’m just gonna sit back and not care about this trend. Nobody wants to find, be behind on that. And you turn local in much, many areas when things are changing on you, you want someone to Local who you’ve trusted, who knows your business and that’s the great place where partners play.
Oftentimes they have industry expertise that a vendor doesn’t have. They have experienced customers and these can be areas where a customer wants a partner to hold their hand through this process. And that’s what I’m here to support. And then I’m sure Sharon has those conversations and sees that every day with our customers.
Really cool.
Yeah we do. And I would say that partners, MSPs, declare your superpower. We hope it’s around AI but security, data, there, there’s a lot to choose from, but, bring that superpower and into our customers organizations because they oftentimes don’t have the resources.
Or the capacity to be experts themselves. And so they there’s a, huge dependency on partners, bringing that level of expertise into their shops to help them grow and innovate. So we’re really leaning on this, the the partner ecosystem to help us there. So a lot to choose from, a lot going on obviously at Google.
I’ll give each a shot at this. For the person in our audience who is intrigued, they’re either ready to get going with Google or they just want to learn more about the opportunities we’ve been discussing here. What’s the first step, the next step that you would recommend to them? Sharon? Yeah, I would say, get curious.
We have a lot of content that, is out in the public domain. If you want to, talk with somebody on the sales side, there’s a, typically we’ve got contact sales, links that you can jump into and we will, get on the phone with you. And then I think from a partner standpoint, I’ll turn it over to Colleen because I think we’ve got a whole platform of content that is curated and built for partners [00:50:00] specifically.
Okay.
Colleen: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s definitely come to partner and vantage. That’s where our experience is and you come into partner advantage and you can figure out, what is the product area to begin with, whether it is security or workspace that fits best for your business. And then we have a training evolution along that.
I will say rich the difference that I see. C for partners from an investment standpoint in this new journey is it really is important to invest in smart, technical talent that the customers are valuing. I think that’s really important to place your bets there and sometimes very industry specific.
So if you have someone who is an expert on the technical side, you’ve maybe done this on the customer side before from a supply chain management perspective. Those are really valued resources that can come in and be an expert to multiple different customers. So I think it’s making sure you have the right technical talent on your side and then making sure you’re bringing them through the right training journey to learn the technologies and then tie it up with the boat.
Having solution offerings that can show and demonstrate, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, AI. Is a show me sales process. They want to see show me in my industry that you’ve done this before. And what does this look like? And almost carry it all the way through. Show me with my data.
I want to give you a data set. I don’t want you to show me the value that AI can bring to me in this specific area. So when a partner has a solution pre developed in that specific industry, I think they may end up selling that solution every single time. But it demonstrates expertise. It demonstrates experience.
It demonstrates. I know how to drive an outcome for you in your industry with AI, with your data. And that helps expedite the sales process and start bringing in that customer base. All the way from getting the right talent in, getting them trained, building out that solution and able to demonstrate that value right off the bat.
The customers, I think that’s the journey to come along and partner advantage. You’ve got all these amazing tools to help partners through that journey, whatever path that they choose.
Very good advice. Colleen Copsey, Sharon Proster. Thank you so much for joining us here on MSP chat. It’s been a pleasure.
Thank you, Rich. Thank you for having us. So folks we are going to take a quick break now. When we come back on the other side, I will be rejoined by my co host, Erick. We’ll talk a little bit about the conversation I just had with Colleen and Sharon. Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We will be right back.
All right, and welcome back part three of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. I wish you could have joined us Erick. I know you would have enjoyed speaking with Colleen and Sharon. They would have enjoyed speaking with you as well, but I’ll just call out a few quick things. First of all, before I forget take a look at the show notes folks, we were talking about the partner advantage website and some other things.
We’ll have links to all that for you in the show notes for this episode. But two things beyond that, that jumped out. First of all, at the end of the interview, I called attention to a suggestion of best practice that Colleen talked about that I really think is smart. Which is she said, and the way she set it up originally was if you’re going to have the AI conversation with an end user, go in with a solution, which is always good advice.
But as she got into it, it became clear what she was talking about. Go into that conversation with something. Interesting that you can demo and it may or may not even be something that you sell or do something specific that is more than just a chat GPT interface and that gives the customer a way to not only get a sense for your expertise, but to really get a feel for.
What AI can do in their setting. Cause it’s very abstract for a lot of companies right now. So I thought that was really good. The other thing that I thought was really interesting is, that the whole reason Google hired Colleen and all this work that she’s doing, that’s going to culminate apparently in some very exciting announcements next April is because they understand that.
Having the AI technology is super important and they have that, but there is a, an absolutely essential services component. To success in AI and they don’t have never will have that services capability in house They need channel partners for that. And so her mission as she said is very much to build a third party channel services arm for AI.
They are in recruitment mode they very much want your your business folks, which Means they’re going to be looking to to entice you to to do business with them. It’s a little bit of a change of pace for Google, where for many years the inclination was always that anything we do, it’s going to be in the cloud and if we’re doing it right, it should be so [00:55:00] simple that it’s like a big red button and you just click it.
Who needs a partner? They understand now they need partners in AI and and they want you MSPs. No, rich. Yeah, I read a book and I was trying to remember the title of it. But the premise of the book, it was all about, I think it was like likening the cloud to the electric grid. If I recall correctly, but the premise was.
When, in, in the 1700s, when electricity was first being developed and Edison took advantage and started electrifying the grid. And there was this, sense that, oh, this is great. We don’t have to use gas lamps anymore. We have electricians coming into our houses.
There was really no forethought about, beyond monetizing, the charging, the users for the electricity and things like that. But what ended up happening was because the grid was now electrified and becoming more and more ubiquitous, more and more, homes and cities and things like that.
The first thing where, you know, the streetlights and things like them, they got into homes, but the. The explosion of all of the other inventions and products that now could be plugged in to use that grid, right? So this is when we started seeing, refrigerators instead of ice boxes. We started seeing, dishwashers, the early days washing machines and things like that.
Think about now, Rich, how important we think that all of the devices and the internet and the things that we use are, but if not for the electric grid, none of it would exist and I’m seeing is AI like that? Is AI now the grid whereby which all of these other business opportunities.
And to help not only businesses, but our personal lives. I know we’re getting AI in our phones here in a minute. It’s showing up on our laptops and our desktops. It’s going to be in most of the things that we use today. So I just had a, just remembered that and thinking, Oh, is AI this next frontier?
That creates all of this advancement now and all of these other business opportunities that we don’t haven’t even thought of yet Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s indisputable that there is that kind of explosion coming and it’s just one more reason why anyone who is listening to or watching this program can’t get started too soon basically on the internal enablement and the education you may or may not feel ready to go to market immediately, but that the Google folks were talking about the resources they make available.
If you want to be ready to seize that moment when that explosion really starts happening now’s the time to start getting ready. Yeah. Early adopter advantage. Absolutely. Absolutely. Erick, that leaves us with time for just one last thing this week, and you will recall on the last episode of the show, I believe, we were talking about how scientists were using mayonnaise to improve nuclear fusion, and I believe I asked the question on the show, is there anything mayonnaise doesn’t make better?
And by golly, I found another example. That we can talk to you about that. Now, as context, I’ll take you back to 2023 Tennessee Titans quarterback will leave us reveals in an interview. That he likes to put mayonnaise in his coffee and this goes viral. People think it’s a hilarious and the folks at Hellman’s mayonnaise thought this was phenomenal as well.
They signed a promotional deal with him to look for, funny, interesting ways unexpected ways to use mayonnaise. And they have just come up with a new one. It is called Will Heavis number eight. And it is a mayonnaise flavored cologne Erick. Now, I say flavored, you’re not supposed to taste it.
But they have created a cologne for men, apparently pricey that is inspired by mayonnaise. And the Hellman’s folks says it has notes of lemon, coffee, musk, vanilla, and of course, the Hellman’s. A mayonnaise accord. One more thing, mayonnaise can help you smell better, Erick. Who knew Rich?
Mayonnaise as a pheromone, right? Potentially. Interesting. That’s a good point. It’s a good point. Yeah who would not be attracted to a guy who smells like mayonnaise? Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on this episode of the MSP chat podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
We’re going to be back in a week’s time with another episode for you. Until then, [01:00:00] allow me to remind you, we are both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, wherever it is, you get those. Take a look for MSP Chat. You’re going to find us if you are listening to us on audio, but curious to check us out on video.
Go to YouTube, look up MSP Chat. You’ll find us there. Either way, however you get to us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other folks like you find and enjoy the show. This program is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the equally great Riley Simpson. Russ and Riley are both parts of the team with us here at Channel Mastered, they can do a show like this for you if you want, and that’s only one of the many things Channel Mastered does for its clients to learn more, go to www.
channelmastered. com. Channel Mastered has a sister company called MSP Mastered, that’s Erick working directly with MSPs on growing and optimizing their business. You can learn more about that venture. www. mspmaster. com So once again, we thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in a week, folks. Until then, please remember you can’t spell channel without M S P.
