Bader Hamdan: Rethinking Ecosystems in the GenAI Era

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Yeah, okay, here we are. We are at Catalyst, and it's lunch time. We get the whole lunch crowd, everybody's, you know, grabbing a bite between keynotes, with some great keynotes just now that we came out of. And then it's, you know, coming right back into keynotes, and then a bunch of lightning talks this afternoon. So it's amazing energy. You know, 700 people all in the keynote session, and it's a it's really incredible to see this community grow and this event grow. So this

Bader Hamdan  0:29  
event has been amazing. The past couple days have been awesome. Like you said, the energy is just, you can feel it. Everybody's just motivated, inspired. And we have a lot more to go between today tomorrow, and it's really, it's been an exciting event so far. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  0:43  
yeah. So I am so excited to be joined right now by batter, Hamdan and butter is known each other for a while now, and butter was leading, you know, partnerships at Twilio. And also the you the clubhouse, you had the clubhouse going, which was, which was awesome, sort of getting, getting people, you know, together and talking about partnerships, and now you're chief partner Officer at vectara, which is, yeah,

Bader Hamdan  1:12  
yeah, no. It's been an amazing journey, you know, from the clubhouse days, it was all about just the giving back to the community. And that was, you know, good venue, Avenue, whatever you want to call it, where, you know, you give back to the community, you talk about partnerships, talk about go to market. And it just kind of grew organically on its own. It was amazing having, you know, folks like Jay McVeigh come in and speak, etc. And now at Victor, I've been here a couple months now, a little bit over almost three months, and Reno responsible for the overall global charter of the ecosystem partnership group. And, you know, team the strategy building out the program, which we just launched the ecosystem partnership program last week, which we're really thrilled about. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, the whole idea there, our overall strategy is to really focus on CO innovation and celebrating success. It's all about the end customer result that we're trying to deliver together. You know, we talk about better together in partnerships all the time. How do you make sure that the program becomes the driver of that? You know? So looking at a different way of doing program that the partner program, we don't have any tiers. We don't have any levels. Those we went away with those kind of traditional concepts, because we want to reward success with the partners based on the consumption and the CO value, the value that we co create together for the end customers.

Chip Rodgers  2:30  
That's really That's awesome. So buchara is, I mean, hot space, you know, just amazing startup, and your co founders, or your founders have incredible pedigree with from Cloudera and Google and so many, so much growth opportunity ahead. How are you thinking about, you know, sort of bringing and you a lot of your partnering is with, you know, so co create, as you said, co creation and having the right APIs for sort of joint solutions to bring to market. How do you How are you thinking about that? How are you working with partners to co create that

Bader Hamdan  3:07  
way? Of course, yeah, look generative. AI is just a hot topic, right? It's high space, and everybody's trying to make sense of it, normalize what it really means for us from a use case perspective. What is that value that we're going to derive out of it? We've created a system, you know, we've created a platform that's API extensible, that customers, partners, can build around, build on top of, to gain value. That's the whole point of a platform, at the end of the day, is the value of the platform, is the value that is getting created around the platform is a lot bigger than the value of the platform itself.

Chip Rodgers  3:40  
Interesting. I love that that's an ecosystem story from the beginning,

Bader Hamdan  3:44  
exactly 100% so that was one of the biggest, you know, couple things that were really motivating for me to come into Victoria was the pedigree of our founders, between our CEO, our CTO, chief architect from, you know, Google Search, Google AI, as well as, as well as, you know, Cloudera and Google, you know, like, there's a lot of pedigree, a lot of knowledge, a lot of, you know, success that's been had, and now we built this really cool platform that really removes the complexity of Gen creating generative, you know, outcomes at the end of the day for business customers, for developers that want to develop, for business customers that want to achieve those outcomes at the end of the day. So I don't need to worry about all of the you know, the details, the complexity of, you know, being an AI ml expert to do the encoding or the retrieval, and all of these things are just abstracted at an API level, your data API, your career API, and we build an ecosystem around that. So that's the exciting part about the strategy for us. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  4:41  
very so, really exciting. It's just amazing. You know, huge opportunity ahead. So how are you, how are you, you know, thinking about, I mean, you've got the leadership team is behind you. That's part of this, part of the strategy, part of the business strategy. So that. It's that's just, you know, tremendous. How are you thinking about, you know, sort of, you know, the ideal partner profile, you know, who you want to recruit and how you go and, you know, attract those

Bader Hamdan  5:13  
partners into the program. Yeah, you know, because of the value that an ecosystem can provide and the platform can provide for the ecosystem. You know, being a platform company, being an API company, we know that the first thing we need to do is make sure that we are creating a seamless, enjoyable, delightful, custom experience for our customers on our platform. So when I'm a customer using the platform, I'm building the integration with viktara, I want to make sure that I simplify all of these other pipes of integrations that come in. So co innovation partnerships are going to be huge priority for us here, you know, between data partnerships, between action engine oriented type of partnerships, and all things in between. You know, couple examples I give you, you know, where, obviously we're partners with AWS right now. We're built on them, and we're, you know, creating the value, additional value, add and go to market motions together. There you look at some of these other elements around, kind of the AI pipeline, right? Somebody like a stability AI, right? Technology partner that we work together to co innovate, to drive different types of outcomes from an imaging and, you know, from a text and image standpoint, is an example. So, really exciting space. Yeah, it couldn't be a hotter market. No, it's not. Yeah, and CO innovation. The way that we've designed the program is it's all about CO innovation, co engagement and CO influence, right? You look at co engagement is all about the the selling motion, the delivering, the solution motion, right? Be it implementations, be it ceiling, et cetera. And a partner can engage with us in multiple fronts. They don't need to be they're not tied to just this one type of engagement path or go to market path. But for us, is about CO creating value and delivering additive go to market motions that bring outcomes and celebrate mutual success at the end of the day. It's a hot space. It's an amazing space. Learning gets on every day, and, you know, it's the power of the community is going to get us

Chip Rodgers  7:05  
there. That's fantastic. Botto, thank you so much for taking a few minutes, and we will be watching because, you know, it's, it's like, it's just this sort of magic formula of, you know, leadership behind you, a hot space. Great Leader, great partner, leader. And just, you know, I know you're going to have amazing success. So, so, yeah, like I

Bader Hamdan  7:28  
said, collective success. And you know, for us, it's, we're just, just they. It's just day one. Yeah, we're just getting started.

Chip Rodgers  7:37  
Awesome butter, thank you, and thank you all for joining and we'll see you later this afternoon. Thanks everybody,

Bader Hamdan  7:46  
hopefully I did write.

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