What’s your view on Google Cloud’s new Premier Partner badging?

Google is receiving feedback from customers that there is a greater degree of expertise that is required. Right now, the tiering structure is such that it’s not as fine-grained as it needs to be on the expertise level.

The expectation at a certain level or a certain tier of partnership is that people come in with the technology expertise and domain expertise to serve customers in their environment This sort of creates another expertise level or credentialing where the customers can be certain to expect a certain level of competence. That’s essentially what’s happening with these Premier badges.

To us, it feels like just another evolution in the majority of Google’s partner programs.

What incentives are in store for Google Cloud partners who achieve a Premier Partner badge?

The incentives come in multiple forms. There are sort of incentives in place for mechanisms like a higher Delivery Readiness Index score. It’s also in the form of deal close. Then in a software sense it’s in the form of partner preference in certain areas for specific types of workloads and given industries, etc.

So there are soft benefits and hard benefits. But over time, we’ve seen that there is a very strong correlation in us moving up the tiering mechanism from a credentialing perspective and the growth and profitability of our business.