For the first time ever, Google Cloud partners can obtain Premier Partner badges for Workspace, Chrome and Google Cloud which will lead to additional incentive dollars and new customer opportunities.

“This is the first time we’ve enabled partners to badge themselves in market,” Bronwyn Hastings, vice president of ISV Ecosystem and Channels at Google Cloud, told CRN. “The need for validated deep expertise, capacity and service excellence is becoming a core element of feedback from the customers.”

The $30 billion Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud computing giant unveiled a total of eight new Premier badges today that partners can attain and display to customers to show their top-level expertise for either Google Workspace, Chrome and Google Cloud—or all three.

Google partners can receive up to three Premier badges—Sell, Service, and Build— for Google Cloud and Workspace based on their business’s engagement model. There is also a Sell and Service Premier badge for Chrome.

Google’s New Premier Partners

Hastings said Google Cloud’s new Premier badging was needed based on how customers are looking to their partners today for more strategic counseling, implementation services and deep product domain expertise.

“Customers aren’t expecting just to buy something, they are expecting the strategic counsel,” she added. “So that deep expertise is really coming through right now and needing that domain knowledge. Some of the partners need to evolve their businesses. Some of them are looking at, ‘How do we actually stand out in this demand for deep domain expertise?’ So we had to look at evolving the [Google Cloud] Partner Advantage Program.”

Robbie Clews, senior director of Google’s Cloud Alliance for London-based partner Kin + Carta, said the new Premier badging is necessary for channel partners to stand out from the crowd who have a “proven track record and proven ability to execute.”

“The new Premier partner badges is just emblematic of the fact that we’re seeing a lot more customer demand for validation around partner capability. In itself, that is a correlation with how much demand Google Cloud is seeing in the marketplace,” said Clews. “It’s our plan and intention to secure the Premier Partner badging status for Google Cloud. That’s where all the focus and fixation is on the enterprises today, especially with the hype around generative AI.”

In an interview with Hastings’s, CRN breaks down the five biggest things all Google partners—from system integrators and resellers to ISVs and MSPs—need to know about Google Cloud’s new Premier Partner badges and how to achieve it.