The latest move comes in hot pursuit of the best marketing practices of traditional IT firms, Google has launched a partner program to help third-party vendors use and sell Google cloud services. This most recent addition to the platform, which already boasts App Engine, Apps and Drive, came a month ago in the form of the Compute Engine, an infrastructure-as-a-service play to rival Amazon Web Services.
According to a blog post on Tuesday from Google Cloud Platform sales chief Eric Morse said that will extend “our partners with the tools, training, and necessary resources they need to successfully address your business’ IT needs.” We will also provide tools that connects with the Compute Engine, BigQuery and Cloud Storage products, while the service partners provide consulting services for developing business, mobile and social apps using the platform, he added.
“Cloud has become core to everything we do here at Google. In the last decade, we have invested in building an infrastructure that can serve 4 billion hours of video every month, support 425 million Gmail users and store 100 petabytes of web index, and it is growing every day,” Morse said.
Will Google Cloud Platform compete? Image: Courtesy of Google
The latest Google offering comes in two different types of partners to spur uptake of its growing stack: service and technology. The former provide consulting and implementation services on various Google Cloud Platform products, and the latter provide tools that integrate with Google’s platform or use one of its services as the foundation for their products.
A list of the partners shows familiar names such as the British systems integrator Appogee on the service partner side, and Jaspersoft and Puppet Labs on the technology side among others.
The full partner list can be found here.