Dai Vu: Unlocking ISV Growth Through Google Marketplace

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Yeah, OK. Welcome back everyone. We're here at Google. Next Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and what an amazing event here at Google. Next, so many people here, and it's just great to be back in person again.

Dai Vu  0:16  
It is. So the last time I was here was 2019 so it's amazing. It's been four years, so it's a great crowd, great excitement, a lot of engagement, and the opportunity to meet a lot of folks in person that I've only had meetings with over video conference. So that's really great. And a lot of energy with all the announcements yesterday. A lot of focus on Gen AI, a lot of focus on the ecosystem. So really, a lot of fun.

Chip Rodgers  0:41  
It's great to hear the ecosystem being so important and talked about in the keynotes, and having so many partners here. Really terrific. So, so I am so excited to be joined by Dai Vu di, is general manager of marketplace, and ISV go to market initiatives, which is that's the place to be. It's really, it's the hot, it's the hot, hot topic these days. Yeah,

Dai Vu  1:05  
marketplace has experienced pretty significant growth over the last few years. It's become mainstream. It's, you know, IT procurement patterns have changed significantly. And more and more solutions are being procured through marketplaces. And the reasons are, you know, it's very compelling from an end customer perspective. It's very compelling from an ISV and seller perspective. And we've, from a strategic standpoint, our investments in ISVs in terms of, hey, they are critical components of workloads that we need to move to the cloud. They help fill, you know, gaps in the portfolio in terms of providing solution completeness. We've invested heavily in the platform, but we've also invested in a lot of incentives to drive those solutions to be transacted through marketplace.

Chip Rodgers  1:49  
That's, yeah, that's really interesting. There's been a lot of that, a lot of that going on. I think that you know, if you want to co sell with the Google field teams, that it needs to be transacted through the marketplace. It just streamlines everything.

Dai Vu  2:05  
Yeah, I mean, if you look from an end customer perspective, I mean, there's the obvious benefit as it relates to drawing down on the customer commit dollar for dollar, but there are a lot more benefits in terms of, like consolidated billing, the ability to have a very streamlined procurement process. And what we're seeing customers do is they're taking their third party spend and just consolidating that with a growing cloud budget. So it's very compelling benefits for them to transact through marketplace. And then, from an ISV perspective, consistently, we hear from our partners that they're able to have shorter deal cycle times. They're able to have higher win rates, and then, surprisingly, also able to get bigger deal sizes, because we're seeing with private offers consistently, deals that are millions and 10s of millions of dollars. And then from a field perspective, we've invested heavily where our field reps get attainment for most solutions on marketplace, and they also have a lot of incentive to bring ISVs into their accounts, because, as I mentioned, solution completeness and help be complete the entire workload that needs to move to the cloud. So if you really kind of look at this supply chain between how an ISV gets their solution into an end customer environment, you think of all the stakeholders along that value chain, whether they be our field reps, our sellers, our services partners, the ISV solutions, the end customers, all the financial benefits all the time to value benefits are very compelling and highly aligned, and that's what's driving this flywheel effect, where you're seeing the significant growth in marketplace overall.

Chip Rodgers  3:35  
That's exciting, and, and, and then, you know, ultimately the customer wins, because you've got a more whole, you know, holistic solution and other other things that are all coming together.

Dai Vu  3:47  
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, our ecosystem, you know, we've invested heavily in our ecosystem over the last few years, both from a coverage standpoint and incentive standpoint. And, you know, consistently, our partners tell us that Google field tends to partner very well. We take a very first party equals third party approach, where we have a very consistent way of how we talk about solutions, how we market, how we distribute and and I think that lands very well with our partners.

Chip Rodgers  4:14  
That's great. So if you're an ISV partner, you know, listening, how should they get started. What's the, what's, what's the entry point? And clearly, the value is there. How do they get started?

Dai Vu  4:25  
Well, I think a couple things. I think number one is, if they're not already part of, you know, the partner program, partner advantage, they need to become a, you know, sell services or build partner that's number one. And then, as they think about getting listed on marketplace, you know, I would advise two things. One, we have a very rich set of documentation online understand like, what it takes to integrate their software into the platform, what are the billing and pricing models that we support? And then, then I would also suggest that they should think about how marketplace kind of fits with an overall cloud go to market strategy. You know, it's not one of these things. You get listed on a marketplace, and all of a sudden there's a ton of business that flows through. I think you have to invest in it, both from a resourcing standpoint, both from a business policy standpoint, you know, like, for example, comp neutral policies in terms of, like, whether deals go through marketplace or offline. Typically, I advise a lot of partners when they get initially listed, maybe to do a private offer only listing, because all you're doing is taking that direct sales motion and bringing it online, and that becomes a very seamless transition for a lot of partners. And then as they get used to the marketplace sales motion, they can extend and exploit some of the other platform features and more the advanced capabilities on billing and pricing and renewals and so forth.

Chip Rodgers  5:39  
So a good way to ease into it, absolutely. Yeah, that's great. So, gosh, so many things happening, anything in particular you'd like to call out that's happening here at Google Next that would be good for ISVs, partners and customers?

Dai Vu  5:56  
Yeah, I mean a couple of things that we've talked about. And I think number one is we're one of the things I want to see for marketplace is I want to enable all partner types to be able to participate in the value creation and delivery. So it's not just ISV and build partners services and sell partners as well. So we're investing quite heavily in terms of enabling the resell motion, for example. And you know, we recently launched some capabilities where an ISV can provide custom discounting to a reseller, so an incentive to sort of drive that solution. And then we're also continuing to invest in other areas, like this concept of cross channel commit burndown. So this is the ability for a direct commit customer with Google to transact through a reseller on marketplace and have that transaction burn down that direct commit so it broadens the set of resellers who could participate in marketplace. So a lot of things we're doing, but enabling and reselling that motion, or enabling that resell motion, is critical.

Chip Rodgers  6:52  
That's fantastic. Di, thank you so much for spending a little bit of time. We're actually working on some things together and excited about excited about that, and and and working with ISVs on that. So yeah, absolutely thanks for having me Chip. Thanks Ty and thank you all for for joining us, and we'll see you. See you next time you.

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