Google Cloud forecasts growth for UK partners

It is always difficult to put numbers to answer the question, “what’s the channel going to gain from working with a particular vendor?”, but Google Cloud has worked with IDC to try to do just that.

With the public cloud giant kicking off its OnAir EMEA event today, there was a chance for it to share the results of its study with IDC into the size of the partner ecosystem opportunity.

Sebastien Marotte, vp, EMEA channel at Google Cloud, penned a blog post to discuss the findings, which included the headline stat that demand for cloud-based technology and services is growing at 22% year on year in the region.

“The research predicts that partners’ revenues from Google Cloud-linked opportunities will more than triple by 2025,” he wrote. “This is an amazing opportunity for all of our partners across the entire EMEA ecosystem, as they develop and build out their Google Cloud practices.”

Specifically, in the UK & Ireland, the partner revenue opportunity growth rate by 2025 is expected to be 2.9 times its current level, he said.

“For every $1 of Google Cloud technology sold, Western European partners will generate $5.49 in revenue via their own products, services and IP (such as new apps and software),” wrote Marotte. “The future looks bright too, as IDC predicts this revenue stream will increase to $7.74 for every $1 of Google Cloud technology sold by 2025.”

He added that Google Cloud had been keen to make sure its partners could add value beyond just providing customers with access to a public cloud platform.

“Partners are reaping the benefits from our target goal of 100% partner attach on customer sales,” he said. “Strong margins are being recorded across resale, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS add-ons, IT services, business services, and support for hardware and networking.”

Marotte said the IDC research had also uncovered the progress that its partner base had made in becoming better positioned to provide a greater depth of cloud services.

“The IDC study also uncovers insights into numerous other benefits that partners are experiencing from collaborating with Google Cloud,” he said. “For example, IDC identifies 50% of Google Cloud partners as at the ‘late stage of digital maturity’, with more than a third having ‘fully integrated digital into their strategies and businesses’.

“With this level of strong expertise in contemporary cloud technologies and solutions, it’s clear that customers can trust Google Cloud partners to deliver on support and implementation for even the most advanced technologies, such as AI and machine learning.”

The Google Cloud research comes just a couple of weeks after a similar study by Public First on behalf of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Both studies make a strong case for the channel to be more involved with selling and supporting the public cloud proposition.

The AWS report concluded that channel partners that embrace cloud are growing more quickly than their rivals and are tapping into a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customer base that is starting to shift towards a hosted environment.