Joerose Tharakan: Unlocking GSI Growth in the AI Era

Chip Rodgers   0:00  
Chip, Hey, everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and gosh. Joe rose, this is a fantastic event today, huh?

Joerose Tharakan  0:09  
It's been good. It's been packed full of really helpful tips and tricks, I think, for members of the Microsoft partner ecosystem, I've learned a lot about what it takes to being a partner of Microsoft, and all the tools and all the ways in which partners look to optimize their use of Microsoft's programs, incentives and the opportunity in this era of AI, yeah,

Chip Rodgers   0:28  
it is amazing. Microsoft is leading in so many ways there. But okay, so I am so excited to be joined by Joe rose Tarakan, and Joe rose, you know, you and I go way back,

Joerose Tharakan  0:43  
one of these, what, six years ago. Now, full circle. I guess we got to do it once every six years. Every

Chip Rodgers   0:48  
six years, that's at least. So, yeah, so 2018 we were at Sapphire together. You were leading the Cognizant relationship for Microsoft. And we had an interview back then. So lot of a lot of time since then. Yeah,

Joerose Tharakan  1:04  
well, I'm still involved in the GSI partner ecosystem. I am now the Chief of Staff for the the GSI business at Microsoft, part of worldwide, global partner solutions. So

Chip Rodgers   1:15  
congratulations on, on the new role. It's very exciting and and you know, a global you've been focused on, Cognizant now expanding to supporting all partners, and that's just a really tremendous opportunity. And congratulations. Thank you.

Joerose Tharakan  1:33  
It's you know, we spoke back then, and was echoed many times today. There's something special about this partner ecosystem. Sometimes these things feel like a get together of alumni and friends, but it really is, what connects everybody is the is the feeling that there is real accretive value to be unlocked from the power of partnerships. That I think Greg sarafin said it really well, and he'll be with us again tomorrow when we do our session of how partnering has become so core. It is not it's not adjacent to revenue. It's kind of core to revenue. And those are the companies in the ecosystem that have really, really accelerated growth by making partnerships very central to it's not just a channel, but it's really core to your revenue generation process.

Chip Rodgers   2:13  
I love that. Yeah, he was talking about that this earlier today. And just like, you know, a seat at the table, basically, you're in your as a partner leader. You're on par with all the other leadership team. And it's a, it's a, it's, it's a way to grow revenue. It's very much tied to revenue. You're thinking about how you're going to build revenues together,

Joerose Tharakan  2:34  
absolutely. And we'll, we'll talk about this more tomorrow, in terms of what we see as the opportunity for our services partners in this coming era, right? It's, it's also increasingly getting more complicated. There are lots of decision vectors. There's lots of ways in which these opportunities present for partners of all different scale sizes. It's not just the large GSIs, which tends to be the area I've predominantly worked in, but also looking at the, you know, the breadth and depth of partners we see featured here today at ultimate partner live.

Chip Rodgers   3:02  
Yeah, so, so what? Talk a little bit about the session that's coming up tomorrow. So you'll have Greg Serafin, and you're, and you're, you're going to be covering, you know, talking about, obviously, you know, GSIs, near and dear to your heart, and how I'm going

Joerose Tharakan  3:17  
to be facilitating a conversation between Steven Boyle, who is Microsoft's global leader for GSI ESI, and advisory partners with Greg sarafin, who you met today, and Greg in his role as a partner, leader for the EY Partnership, which has been one of our long standing partnerships. In EY, we'll speak a little bit about kind of what they've done but in the last 10 years and where they are at this inflection point today. And Simone will bring that, you know, full circle in terms of what that means to learn from EY journey for services partners of all sizes. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers   3:51  
that's fantastic. So how about some of the sessions today? They've been, you know, really just, it's been a great day, great content. I love getting to meet everybody. We're sort of, sort of a happy hour at this point, right? This

Joerose Tharakan  4:07  
is the more fun part of the evening, though. It's been fun all day. I mean, honestly for me, I felt like today was I learned a lot about ISV channel, certainly the marketplace, that opportunity, I think carve and tackle spoke a lot about what they're seeing as buyers preferences. We see that too. We see buyer preferences changing and shaping the way the kind of tools, the kind of processes that need to be made available. So marketplace, to me, is is really a very interesting opportunity in this era of AI. It is still predominantly very much SaaS solution led but, marketplace for services is kind of maybe the next Advent. And as someone said, like the idea of, how do we make these partnerships more efficient? Today, we have a lot of people doing the business of partnership. It's come mainstream. But how do we make this efficient? What is the role AI plays in even the function in the business of partnerships? I think. Going to be the exciting next decade ahead of us.

Chip Rodgers   5:02  
It really is. AI is all about partnerships, right? You can't. There are so many different layers and levels and capabilities with between llms and rag and just all the pieces that need to come together, plus then the ultimate use cases. It's a partner play, yeah. And

Joerose Tharakan  5:19  
in fact, we're in the process of doing our AI tour, every every stop of the I tour, you're hearing more announcements, and that will come to a head when we come up to ignite, which is coming up in Chicago. So I hope everyone follows us along on this journey, because there's some there's some cool stuff coming definitely,

Chip Rodgers   5:34  
definitely, we'll be there and and it should be a great event. So Joe rose, maybe you know, it's been fantastic. Thank you for sharing a little bit of time with us. I love to ask just if you would have any you know, you've been a partner leader for many years, working with partners through the ups and downs, the challenges and, you know, some sticky situations, anything that you've you've learned along the way that you would want to share with other partner leaders.

Joerose Tharakan  6:02  
You know? What would I say? I would just say, Look, we are just as we saw personal computing democratized and we saw cloud democratizing. AI, the opportunity here to for AI to democratize data is boundless. Is boundless. I think, you know, this was reinforced many times today. I think the best advice I can give is be agile. You know, look around the corners of all the opportunities that this presents. You know. I think you know whether you are a partner that is all six solution areas, whether you're a partner that has a distinct competitive advantage in one solution area, AI is actually opening all of those doors. It is. It's not limiting. And in fact, like every every aspect of what you do, whether you provide a service, whether you provide a solution, whether you provide a licensing vehicle, whether you provide, you know, tools like word span does for the business of partnership AI is having an element so, so my, I think my best advice for partners and partner managers on both sides is, is, be it agile, is look to the greater creative opportunity. What does the influx of aI mean in terms of innovation, in terms of efficiency, in terms of, you know, faster speed to market. I think analyzing that this is that inflection point for all of us to do that homework and figure out what that competitive advantage is for each of our businesses.

Chip Rodgers   7:31  
Great advice, because I'm telling you this, the speed of change has just been unbelievable. Yes,

Joerose Tharakan  7:38  
I think like we're all running faster, and we need those co pilots and those assistants to help us, but it's so much more than that. It's going to be so much more than that. Joe

Chip Rodgers   7:47  
rose, thank you. Thank you for taking some time, and we'll go enjoy and have a good day tomorrow.

Joerose Tharakan  7:55  
See you tomorrow.

Chip Rodgers   7:56  
Thanks everybody for joining, and we'll see you next time. It

Unknown Speaker  8:02  
was awesome, all right?

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