6 Ways Partners Can Succeed With The Google Cloud Platform

2nd Generation Cloud

Google's cloud might trail rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in market share, but the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant controls some of the best computing technology the world's ever known. And it's using it to empower channel partners.

Google Cloud Platform is increasingly blurring the lines between IaaS and PaaS, offering cutting-edge development environments, analytic tools and interconnectivity options along with flexible pricing schedules. Google Apps add a robust suite of SaaS applications.

Google encouraged partners at the Google Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco to leverage this powerful platform to develop and administer unique business solutions.

Don't Be (Just) A Reseller

All the commodity players are announcing price cuts on storage, compute, memory and features faster than cloud startups are forming in Silicon Valley. As prices drop, so do margins. Scraping a percentage off the top of a public cloud resale is increasingly becoming an unsatisfying proposition.

Something Google has dubbed Moore's Law Pricing is going to eat away at the profits of solution providers that don't adapt to the new realities of the cloud and transform themselves into more than resellers.

Add Value, Create Solutions

Business customers need IT solutions, not resources. Google is providing platforms that enable its partners to build, provision and deliver customized, cloud-based applications that are robust and scalable.

Those versatile technologies integrated into Google Apps, App Engine and Compute Engine present opportunities to add-value across a spectrum of hosted services by incorporating big data analytics, mobility and networking solutions, management tools, third-party applications and more.

If Possible, Be A Hybrid Solution Provider

That means a systems integrator, managed services provider, reseller and even developer to boot. The more solutions a solution provider can actually offer their customers, the more tools they have at their disposal to not only win and retain business but also profit from a recurring revenue model.

Get To Know Containers

This thing called Docker you keep hearing about -- it's for real.

At Cloud Platform Live, Google made abundantly clear it believes Linux containers, a technology Google has used internally for more than a decade, represent the future of the cloud and will become the preferred environment for hosting the next generation of cloud-native applications.

Brian Stevens, Google's VP of cloud platforms, said Docker quickly "became the de facto industry standard" for representing these containers. Google has been the primary force behind Kubernetes, an open-source project for supporting large Docker container deployments.

By mastering containers, solution providers can offer clients rapidly provisioned, self-contained application environments that yield quick development cycles and ease the pain of administration.

Think Mobile

Google's VP of engineering, Joerg Heilig, told attendees at Cloud Platform Live "we are working very hard to make Google the best possible cloud for mobile application development."

It's a multi-device world, and Google wants partners to offer enterprises solutions that extend beyond the office and throughout their mobile workforce.

Much of the technology making that possible comes from the acquisition of Firebase, which its cofounder, James Tamplin, described to attendees as a platform for real-time development of mobile applications.

"Firebase and Google Cloud Platform are building the best developer platform in the world," Tamplin said.

Relieve IT Administrators

At first, the public cloud was a great way to perform the same IT tasks of the past in a cheaper and more scalable fashion.

But that's no longer enough, Brian Stephens, VP of cloud platforms, told attendees at Google Cloud Platform Live.

Solution providers need to "relieve IT administrators," Stephens said, not just give them the same choices in a different package.

"The generation one of the public cloud is fantastic, but it's largely been about moving a virtual machine into someone else's data center," Stephens said.

Successful channel partners must now leverage the power of the cloud to greatly simplify provisioning of resources, IT management, system updates and maintenance, and application deployments.

The CIO will be grateful.