Google Cloud Platform Program Shows Drive To Take Business From IT Giants

Google has a new cloud partner program that shows the company’s drive to go after old IT.

In a blog post today, Google provided some details about it with a link to a list of the technology and service providers that are part of the program.

It’s a short list but here’s what they are offering. Service providers deliver consulting services for the various Google Platform Cloud products. This would include the new Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Big Query and its prediction and translation APIs.

Technology partners provide integrations with Google Platform Cloud or use one of its services as a foundation for their products.

Google is hinting that it will use its partner program to pursue customers who want to migrate off legacy solutions.

According to the Google blog post:

For example, Orangescape Technologies, one of our partners, integrated Google App Engine as part of their platform to help United Biscuits, a leading manufacturer of biscuits and snacks in Europe, migrate their legacy Lotus Notes applications to the cloud.

BM Lotus Notes is fair game. But that’s an easier one to pick off. We’ve been seeing that migration for a while.

Interestingly, in the blog post, Google does not give much attention to the technology partners. It mentions Orangescape and Google core products that partners can leverage. But there is no other mention of the partners themselves.

Here are the technology partners just for the sake of showing them:

Google is just getting started with its partner program. Compare it to the Amazon Web Services partner program and you see just how green Google’s program really is. Amazon Web Services has four different partner categories with lots of various resources for customers.

But these are early days. We are still in the phase of maturing cloud infrastructures. In context, it’s a decent enough start. Google has had success with its Google Apps partner programs that it used to help develop its app store. The Google cloud platform partner program may be just the right follow up.