How does this partner approach differ from other cloud providers?

Our approach to partnering. We believe it’s fundamentally different.

We believe that the lines are blurring of what partner types are. So the days of just saying, ‘Well, I’m working with monolithic partnerships. I’m doing this with this partner, and this with another partner’ are over. We believe an effective network ecosystem is what’s going to solve customer problems.

So we start with every industry to understand what are the significant pain points in the industry? What are the biggest problems that need to be solved? What’s the TAM [total addressable market] for that problem? What are we building? Where are there gaps or white spaces where we don’t plan to go?

We’re proactively sharing those white spaces with the partner community so they know where they can build and know we’re not going to be entering their spaces, it’s not on our roadmap.

We’re building a network to solve that problem versus just one-to-one monolithic partnerships in the past.

Why is that so important? Because it takes a village to deliver and solve a customer problem.

Give me a good example.

When data is sitting in silos, you need to bring together a complete ecosystem to solve this problem for customers.

Data is sitting in point-of-sale systems when you go into the retail store. Data is sitting in CRM systems like Salesforce. Data is sitting in supply chain systems like SAP.

You need to solve that problem by bringing in, not only multiple software partners, but you actually have to bring in strategic advisory firms and consulting firms that can not only deploy and stitch this offering together that we’ve built—but also to do all the organizational change management, business process and reengineering.