New Google Cloud Center Provides ISV/SaaS 'Evangelism'

Google Cloud has launched a new center of excellence to provide "evangelism capabilities" and dedicated resources to help independent software vendors (ISVs) accelerate their cloud transformations. The Google Cloud ISV/SaaS Center of Excellence will provide training, hands-on design workshops and field enablement -- applying Google Cloud's experience delivering applications and products at massive scale -- to help ISVs move their software from on premises to the cloud and leverage the No. 3 cloud computing provider's and broader Google's capabilities. "We're providing evangelism capabilities so that we can help the ISVs understand how we can support them…and solution architects so that we can work hand in hand with them to be able to define the solution architecture of how they would move their application to the cloud," Siddhartha Agarwal, Google Cloud's managing director of SaaS partnerships, told CRN. The center will work with ISVs whether they're transforming their applications with open, cloud-agnostic architectures, transforming their users' experience through artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and voice or delivering intelligent insights from their applications by providing analytics to business users. "Many ISVs are working with customers to migrate business critical applications from on premises to the cloud, either'lifting-and-shifting' as quickly and easily as possible, or, more often, taking the opportunity to upgrade and adopt modern, cloud-native architectures based on containers, microservices, serverless and open source software," said Agarwal.