Google Cloud Star Onix On 2026 AI Trends, Google’s AI Lead And New Partner Program
Onix CEO Sanjay Singh explains why Google Cloud will lead the AI era, Onix’s new platform and the biggest changes for partners inside Google Cloud’s new partner program.
AI superstar Onix is betting heavily on Google Cloud to be the world’s AI leader with major investments slated for Onix in 2026 around AI innovation, edge computing, geography expansion and Google Cloud’s new partner program.
“Despite all the hype of all the LLM [large language model] companies and AI agents’ companies, the key in AI is four things—it is not only the shiny LLM model,” said Sanjay Singh, CEO of Onix, one of Google Cloud’s top partners on a global basis.
Princeton, N.J.-based solution provider Onix is a 16-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year award winner. The company recently won two Google Cloud 2025 Partner of Year awards: one for Data & Analytics for North America, and one for Industry Solutions in Telecommunications.
[Related: Google Cloud’s New Partner Network Is Here: 12 Huge AI, Features And Changes To Know]
Singh has decades of AI and Google Cloud experience with plans in 2026 to launch a “game-changing” new platform and leverage the new Google Cloud Partner Network to drive more revenue.
“In most cases with AI, retail e-commerce has now today become agentic AI-commerce,” Singh said. “So you will see lot of this AI being verticalized for use cases. So we’re getting ahead of that narrative in terms of investing in verticals for industry solutions and protocols that will be relevant for those markets.”
In an interview with CRN, Singh explains why Google will come out on top in the AI era, Onix’s upcoming new platform and his expert view on the biggest changes to Google Cloud’s new partner program.
What are your bullish thoughts on Google this year? Did Onix hitch its cloud wagon to the right horse compared to the other big cloud providers?
We knew that the data and AI companies will rule the future many years back. We already saw that writing on the wall. So it was a constant strategy for Onix to hitch our wagon to Google.
Despite all the hype of all the LLM companies and AI agents companies, the key in AI is four things: it is not only the shiny LLM model. That is only one part of the story.
The second part of story is the chips on which it works, so your hardware sets.
Third is your availability across the globe where it can be rendered.
Fourth, and often missed, is your carbon footprint and your power requirement to operate the entire stack.
The companies which will rule, and continue to rule and dominate AI, will be the company which has an integrated strategy around all these four stacks.
Google has played the long game very nicely. They have been in this business for almost 16 years. This is not something new.
They’ve been doing AI since they bought DeepMind in many years back.
Their integrated strategy is now beginning to see results in the market, because now Gemini 3 is performing better than any AI agent out there or models out there. And the gap you will see will now expand further in terms of the leaders.
Ultimately, you have to lower the cost down per transaction. That is where the whole game is. So if you control the hardware, if you control the cloud, if you control the chip sets, and if you control the power required to run this in a very efficient manner, you will win.
That is actually what is happening now. No other company has this in the world, or can do all these four things together, but Google.
Click through to read about what Singh is seeing around AI market trends, upcoming Onix innovation, and the new Google Cloud Partner Network partner program.
We see it as a shift in the right direction. What typically was happening before is that — not only in Google, even in just the industry — you are not being recognized and valued for the value that you create for the customer, which is measurable.
In this big shift, what they have done is that they have relegated the old industry way of rewarding for a volume and actually rewarding for the value that we measure to our customers.
And the way it is monitored, and being communicated to the partner through a very transparent, online, AI-driven system — makes it very, very easy.
Number two: the other thing I like about this program is that it’s one program. It’s global in nature. So once you get recognized, you don’t have to go through regional approvals, regional briefings and individual discussions to get this done.
It’s very automated, very system-driven, very focused on measuring the value that you’ve created for the customer.
Number three: The underlying philosophy behind this is that you can only create value to the customer if you have competency.
So they have created a very, very interesting tier structure with Diamond, Premier and Select. And achieving each one of them, you have measurable gates in terms of competency, of value delivered, and advanced competencies in various areas.
It also gets an annual reset automatically. So you can’t be grandfathered in, you have to kind of earn it.
How important are Google Cloud’s new competencies in terms of increasing partner sales and helping them find new customers?
If I zoom out and look at it from a customer perspective, what this partner program and the competency tiering does is it creates equal playing ground between a global GSI and a specialized partner like us.
So it elevates the profile of partners who are doing specialized and very high-end execution work and transformation work. So it is not getting bundled into the overall things.
You can go at a competency level and say, ‘OK, this partner is the best in the world for this area.’
So you become relevant for that particular area very, very quickly. So it creates an even playing field.
Because the way Onix is structured as a services-as-software company with an IP-led asset, is we are able to show competency. We are able to show value very quickly.
It creates an even playing field and, hopefully, it gives us the differentiated positioning that we deserve.
What are the biggest market trends in AI that you’re seeing right now?
We are seeing that AI has moved into production now. It’s moved out of the high cycle that we saw for the last couple of years.
We see that data intelligence and intelligence in context is very, very critical to make AI successful. Onix has a leading IP around that which helps customers to get context and lineage out of their raw data based upon where they are.
Third is an area that we are very heavily investing in, which you will see in launch coming soon in April, is making this intelligence available at the edge for business self-service. So that customers can get value from their data and their AI implementation across horizontal vertical areas.
We continue to invest in our vertical story. We continue to invest in our horizontal capabilities. We continue to invest in our IP.
Talk about the new platform Onix is launching in a few months.
You will see the next generation of our platform being launched in April, which will be game-changing in many areas.
It will help our partners further accelerate their value. And it will help our people and our customers to further shorten time to value even more than what we have today. So in we are going to increase the cycle.
We are also investing heavily in expansion in terms of different geographical areas as Google expands its footprints geographically.
In most cases with AI, retail e-commerce has now today become agentic AI-commerce.
So you will see lot of this AI being verticalized for use cases. So we’re getting ahead of that narrative in terms of investing in verticals for industry solutions and protocols that will be relevant for those markets. We see very strong demand for data and AI and global services across the spectrum.
Can you explain Onix’s expansion efforts in 2026?
We already have operations in India, so we are expanding further into multiple countries in the Nordics region.
We are expanding into multiple areas in the Middle East markets as well. Those two are our new investments for this year.
We are also investing heavily in the corporate sector for Google. We think that the full-stack go-to market solutions are needed for that market.
So we will take our execution engine, our price points, our time to value, into this corporate sector— as Google calls it— who will greatly benefit from our solutions in a prepackaged manner.
Those four areas are what we are working towards executing on.