On The Record With Tom Galizia

Deloitte Consulting earned Google Cloud’s Global Services Partner of the Year award at the cloud provider’s Next ’19 conference earlier this month in San Francisco, where both companies announced they would collaborate on next-generation solutions targeting the healthcare, financial services and retail industries.

A Google Premier Partner, Deloitte Consulting also was revealed as a systems integrator launch partner for Anthos, Google Cloud’s new multi- and hybrid-cloud offering that allows customers to build and manage applications across their on-premises data centers and on Google Cloud and third-party clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

CRN talked to Tom Galizia, Deloitte Consulting’s San Francisco-based senior technology partner and lead commercial partner for its Alphabet/Google alliance, about the company’s relationship with Alphabet/Google, which he said would constitute its “fastest billion-dollar services business.”

Galizia has worked for Deloitte Consulting for 27 years. A little less than 2-1/2 years ago, chairwoman and CEO Janet Foutty asked him to “do what we could do amplify and scale the relationship across all dimensions with Alphabet/Google,” he said.

“I ran Deloitte’s tech strategy, architecture and infrastructure business, which was inclusive of cloud for the five years running from 2011 through the end of 2016, and it had 1,100 people in it,” Galizia said. “As I was coming out of that job, I basically went to her and to our industry leader and said, ‘I can either pick up the five hobbies I've neglected for the last, at the time, 46 years of my life, or you give me something exciting to dig into.’”

Galizia saw Alphabet/Google as a “high-potential, high-beta space.”

“It's really a category of one in terms of what it is as a company, and all the different things that they're involved in,” he said.

“We decided from the very early innings that we were going to put a strategy in place that had, at the core of it, the priority (of driving) several billions of dollars’ worth of revenue for Google and for Alphabet more broadly, to become relevant,” Galizia said. “We had no interest in being a bit player. We wanted to be, and we strive to remain, Google's preferred global services partner. Certainly, in Google Cloud, we've achieved that the last couple of years as their global (systems integrators) partner of the year. We're now after hashtag three-peat.”

“We’re doing a very formal alliance around GCP (Google Cloud Platform), we have a very formal alliance and market success across Google Marketing Platform,” Galizia said. “We've got significant momentum around their AI (artificial intelligence)/machine learning (ML) capabilities. We've done really good work with their Maps business around smart cities and a whole host of other industry and horizontal solutions.”