Samrah Khan: How Google and Services Partners Co-Sell and Win in AI

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Ahead, let's try that. Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers back again with another episode of Inside partnering. And so excited to be joined by Samer Khan, who is head of SI Partnering for SI Partners for North America at Google. And Samer welcome.

Samrah Khan  0:20  
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  0:23  
so gosh, we're here in the Palo Alto Google offices, and it's a quiet Friday.

Samrah Khan  0:29  
It is a quiet Friday. That is right.

Chip Rodgers  0:33  
So, you know, ordinarily more, I think middle of the week tends to be more, you know, busy and bustling. You're actually based in the San Francisco office most of the time, but have meetings down here in Palo Alto and I'm sure Mountain View as well

Samrah Khan  0:47  
regularly, which is at a cloud headquarters. Yeah, yes. So I'm up and down the peninsula the whole all the time.

Chip Rodgers  0:56  
Well, I'm just so, so thrilled to talk with you summer. You know, you've had a long career in technology, gosh, with MuleSoft and like, five years, I think, now with Google and managing a number always in partnering, partner, sales, partner, partner, managing partners. And with Google, you've had a really interesting background, both with managing ISVs, and now you're managing all of the SI Partners, not the global sis and not the small, sort of long tail, but the meat of all the SI Partners.

Samrah Khan  1:32  
That is correct, yes, yeah. It's been a pretty interesting journey, but almost five years at Google, in few different roles, ISV partnerships. On the horizontal side, ISV partnerships on the industry side. And then now I lead the North America si team. That's

Chip Rodgers  1:48  
fantastic. Well, I love that industry experience as well. We'll come back to that. I think it's, you know, when you get into industries, it's always really interesting and and you get into really, you know, meaty use cases and in each in each industry.

Samrah Khan  2:04  
Yes, absolutely,

Chip Rodgers  2:06  
yeah. So, so tell me a little bit about what you and your team. Let's just start there. What are you and your team up to these days and and what are your What are your objectives with with Google?

Samrah Khan  2:19  
Yeah, you know, we we're actually very much tied to what Google Cloud priorities are for for the year. And you know, my partner and role is obviously to tie our partnership goals and priorities to what the clouds overall priorities are. And there are literally three things that we're really focused on this year. Number one is it's very important for us to do net new customer acquisition. So we're very focused in working with our partners, driving success for them and for us by acquiring net new logos for Google. The second one is, you know, all around the AI. And as you all know, what a surprise. Yes, it almost sounds cliche to say AI, right? You can't do any podcast without saying AI anymore. So the second one is that we're really focused on winning the AI war, and we understand it's very, very critical, and because of Google's deep expertise, and you know, two decades of work and history in AI that we are very well positioned to to do that. And I think partners play an instrumental role in that, because the way technology is changing and moving, we really need our partners to be, you know, working with us side by side. And last but not the least, is all around, you know, driving consumption or revenue for for cloud. And I think partners play a really instrumental role in that, because we're very much focused in building amazing products and platforms for our customers, but ultimately it is our partners that come in and do the implementation. Man, in many cases, management of those services within our customer base that drives consumption for us. So those are the three key things that are cloud priorities, and we are aligning our partners, in our business and in my team specifically to that, yeah,

Chip Rodgers  4:09  
well, that's fantastic. You know, the end, you're absolutely right. It's the partners that are really and talk about industry solutions. They're the ones that really know the use cases and have deep expertise within industry. So your background, having come from industries really relevant?

Samrah Khan  4:26  
Yes, absolutely. You know, one of the things that we look at the partner landscape, and how services partners, or the services industries, is now partnering with with hyperscalers, is tremendously changing from where we were, let's say, two years ago, or even 18 months ago, we are really looking at partners now that bring domain expertise, but bring domain expertise, or industry expertise, not just post sales, but also pre sales. So actually they're out with our account teams and our field teams with the customers, having conversation. So before the deal even closes, or before, you know, a product is even adopted by a customer to really understand what took place at the front end for the customer to adopt, whether it's, you know, Agent space, or whether it's, you know, BigQuery or our Gemini platform, et cetera. So our model is really evolving, where Google is leaning in a lot more towards partners that have domain expertise and also pre sales expertise. And I think that's where we're seeing the big momentum in the in the market, on on cross collaboration and mutual

Chip Rodgers  5:32  
success. That's really interesting, that sort of pre sales emphasis. I could really see that being valuable, especially because I think some, you know, today, so many companies and enterprises are trying to figure it out, right? So it's part of the process of like, how are we going to put all these things together to really have strong impact in the company and for their customers? And so that that expertise is really valuable,

Samrah Khan  6:00  
exactly? And you know, the partners are always looking for guidance, and they're like, hey, you know what? What AI conversation should we be having with the with the customers? Or, you know what? What is Google seeing? What is like customers, AI strategy? And I'm like, we are guiding customers that they need to have a business strategy, and AI is part of that business strategy. AI is not a separate strategy, right? It's like we went through this journey of digital transformation, you know, two phase. It now we then. We went through this phase of people in 2023 early 2024 having an AI strategy. And now it's like AI is just part of your business. So you need to have your business planning. You need to have your business strategy, whether it's cost optimization, whether it's top line revenue, whether it's employee productivity, depending on the industry you are in, and then AI just sort of is part of your business strategy. And that's why the partners that understand the domain then understand the business, and because they understand the business, they are in a much better position to then guide the customer towards what are the right technologies out there the customer should be considering. And without having that domain expertise and those business outcome conversations, I think you're just sort of waiting for for the customer, or the hyperscaler and the customer to make a decision, and then you just come in later to do the work which is, which is good enough, just not too interesting,

Chip Rodgers  7:26  
right, right? Well, and, you know, it leads me to the to the question for you, but the topic that I think is, you know, really interesting, which is CO selling, and what you're describing is exactly that, right? It's putting the field teams together from Google and from the FSRs as well as the, you know, the industry leads for partners, and you probably have technology leads as well, and putting that sort of virtual account team together to go build something that has value for customers.

Samrah Khan  8:02  
Absolutely, our whole go to market in North America actually is built around co selling and, you know, Google in itself, in the region in North America has done investment where we have dedicated industry specific co sell teams and region specific co sell teams that are sort of, I would call them a conduit between our partners, my team, as well as the Field Sales Team, Scott Barnes and part of his team, part of his part of his team, yeah, Scott has recently changed it also we, you know, we wish him luck, but yeah, portion of his his team, and we are expecting the same with our partners. So for example, starting last year, we were very intentional in asking our partners to invest in Google Cloud business units. And that does not mean that they have to have a team of 50 people or 100 people running around, but we need to see the same investment from the partners in terms of, do you have sales people that wake up every morning thinking about Google Cloud services? Or, you know, do you have alliances, people that are putting governance in place around business planning, business metrics, measurement around, you know, quarterly booking, reviews, et cetera, and then having field CTO or solution, you know, architects that are deep experts in Google Cloud technology. So there is a good synergy from our partner engineering team, our CO sell team, our partner management team, in, you know, in working in collaboration on day to day basis with the same people that are all waking up to the same goals every morning, as opposed to, hey, we'll go to the customer, depending on if the customer says, I want the red apple or the green apple. Just offer the customer whatever Apple is there just be more intentional.

Chip Rodgers  9:48  
That's terrific. That's so you just described an entire, you know, go to market, right, with partners, which is, I'm sure is both really valuable for Google, but also. Really valuable for the partners as

Samrah Khan  10:01  
well. Absolutely, yeah. And I think it's, it's a two way street, right? So we have put the construct in place for that specific reason, because we understand that there's kind of three legs to engaging with the partner. There's the whole product solution element to him. So we have teams for, you know, technical teams focused on that. There is like the CO selling element to it, which comes before, right, the implementation starts. So there is a whole go to market aspect to that, and there is like the partner management and programs and strategy and marketing aspect to that. And then we have right teams that, that we have built to support that, that whole construct, and we expect, you know, the same mapping from the partner's perspective, depending on how deep their engagement is with us, what size and scale they're operating on. And then, of course, we pick the areas to go to market. So we're very intentional. So we're picking a couple of industries. We're picking, you know, two or three solutions where the partner really has a differentiated story on Google Cloud, and that's the message that we're taking to the customer. So if it's, you know, if it's, let's use Oracle as an example, if it's, if it's Oracle and Google Cloud, like, what is the data story around that that's differentiated, that's out in the market, that we're taking to the to the customers.

Chip Rodgers  11:21  
So, you know, at Google Next, you know, there were some really exciting announcements around, around AI, agent to agent. And, you know, a number of, you know, marketplace and all the, the, the, you know, some pretty exciting things around AI, what? How are you seeing? Partners sort of be a part of that, you know, both in terms of delivery and then in terms of their capabilities to to help explain the story and build it into the into customers,

Samrah Khan  11:54  
solutions. Yeah, I think, you know, the world really has, has woken up in the last couple of years to to this AI revolution in a way that I don't think any, anybody, any of us, had imagined, you know, maybe back in early, early 2023, so it's a, it's a pretty interesting time. AI has been around forever, but agent tech, AI has really changed the game. And now a to a, even, you know, a to a. Even more, in my personal belief, I think we're going through this revolution, or a journey right now where AI is going to even have a bigger and a more profound impact on our lives, in our lifetime, than Internet or mobile, which I just, I just couldn't think that we could top internet. And I think eventually we are already there. And, you know, this is, this is just the beginning. And I think we will, you know, a profound impact that we'll see from a eyes is probably bigger than, bigger than that. So obviously the market, the demand, both on the consumer side and on the enterprise side, is like is tremendous. And I can quote many different use cases and stories around, you know, around AI that have improved my life in a personal way, and then obviously is improving lives and my life in a professional way. And just for enterprises in general, partners play a very critical role, because the technology is changing very fast, so fast. It's crazy. Something we've ever seen like, you know, I was, I was telling my team what we were, what we're selling today, didn't exist six weeks ago. That's, it's true in a hyper scalar world, that's just like on, you know, just unheard of, right? If you, if you go way back 15 years ago, you know, or 20 years ago at the start of the infrastructure, right? Like infrastructure, just getting stuff on the infrastructure was like a two year, three year journey, right? And now we are at capital investments, and all massive capital investment to shadow IT, to move things from on prem to cloud, but you need something in between, etc, and now it's just like we're talking to customers and partners about stuff that didn't exist six months so this, which means we're pushing out a lot of learning and training and enablement. And I think the response from the partners have been tremendous. I mean, our incoming response from partners wanting to, to get on our agent speed Space Platform, get expertise built on it is like, is humongous. And then, you know, building, building connectors, and deploying connectors and doing custom, custom agent work on our, you know, leveraging our, our AI platform, has been amazing. And you know, some of the partners that are more innovative, you know, culturally and in nature, you know, I have been faster to pick it up. Partners that are closer to having line of business conversations, to some extent, are able to address. Adopt this technology much faster, because a lot of use cases and a lot of decision making is, you know, is moving away from it to line of business use cases solving specific problem. So I think those are the partners that have you I, in my mind, sort of like a speed start. But I think, you know, literally, even I've seen in the traditional, traditional system integrator business, some of the traditional size have really up their game. You know, the Magic Quadrant just came out a few days ago, and I was fairly surprised to see for generative AI, where the key players landed in the in the ecosystem, and I was surprised by some of it, also in a good way.

Chip Rodgers  15:45  
Yeah, that's terrific, well. And so along those lines, how are you seeing, you know, sort of new partners emerging that maybe didn't have, you know, weren't and but they just really been on their game, on in AI. Has AI really impacted the partners that you're working

Samrah Khan  16:04  
with? Absolutely, and I think, you know, the trend that I am noticing, or we're noticing, is the landscape of, what does it mean to be solution services provider or system integrator with with AI, to some extent, is changing, you know, historically, if you are doing infrastructure deployments and those kind of deployments, you really need to have a big size bench, and you need to have very specific kind of expertise on a specific hyper scaler. And you know, that's how you go and you engage, engage a customer, engage a customer. Now with the evolution of generative AI or agentic AI, we're seeing a lot of smaller size partners that don't need that massive you know, infrastructure deployment, migration, delivery, bench people, rather very specific, AI, deep expertise, type of folks that are going in, they understand the, you know, a specific, again, a specific industry. Let's use, you know, retail, CPG or tech ISVs, or, you know, something like that. They have specific use case, whether it's change management, whether it's like, you know, user customer, user experience, or or like enterprise search or internal search, or something like that, or employee productivity for that matter. And they're going and they're delivering these use cases and solving for these problems in like six to 10 weeks, right? Like to get started. So I think the project timelines, the type of people you need, what they're doing, who they're talking to. All of that in the last year or 18 months, has has shifted, has shifted significantly. That has given opportunity to non addition, non traditional system integration or solution service provider to come up. And, you know, I think it'll be a miss to not mention the data portion of it are, you know, we're seeing that system integrators that have invested in data expertise and use cases are having a lot more success with AI than then, you know, then partners that are that were not focused in that area. And the reason for that is that you need to have your data strategy sorted out. You need to have your game plan for your data plan, and especially around security, I was gonna say especially around security, in order to leverage AI, you know, in or a fish efficiently and effectively. Otherwise, if you're living, you know, because we're, everybody's out of the POC world now, right? We're actual product production use cases out there. So I think it's very, very critical that, you know, partners and customers that are really thinking about their end to end data strategy and putting that in place, you know, are going to see much more leverage out of AI than the ones that are again separating AI from everything

Chip Rodgers  19:02  
else. I love that. So industry expertise, line of business expertise, data,

Samrah Khan  19:11  
really, that's pre sales,

Chip Rodgers  19:14  
fantastic. So summer, let's talk a little bit about CO innovation, working with partners. And I know, you know, you have a history with ISVs, and of course, there's a lot of sort of technology integration there. But even with size, there's still co innovation that you're doing. Can you talk a little bit

Samrah Khan  19:31  
about that? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. And it, you know, we are always big on talking about how is one plus one equals three with the partner, and you know you you do it by by a couple of different ways. Number one, either you're building industry or a domain specific solution that leverages Google Cloud, unique platform capabilities. What? Whatever they may be. It could be an AI platform, it can be a data platform, it can be search it can be, you know, various different things. Or the second way you, you know you are doing one plus one equals three is that you our partners, are actually building their own IP. That is, that leverages Google Cloud. So without mentioning partner names or their platform, like there's an example would be, you know, there's a partner that does app modernization and mainframe modernization in the financial services space, and they have built a platform that leverages Gemini for modernizing the code, whether it's COBOL or something else, right? Like, that's a very unique, differentiated story that when we go to the banking customers, only this partner and Google can tell

Chip Rodgers  20:49  
together. Wow, what a great story for that partner,

Samrah Khan  20:53  
exactly. Or, like in healthcare, it's all around. You know that outside of HIPAA compliance, there are many other data regulations. And you know, the data is kind of spread between pair providers, clinicians, etc. You know the ability to kind of aggregate all of that data with data compliance, et cetera. And then you know, a partner building sort of a use case where a clinician when seeing a patient, can see the the reports or analysis from multiple different sources, and kind of getting a summary, again, is a very specific use case where, you know, the partners are really differentiating. So we're seeing a lot of that, where our partners are, you know, leveraging our technology and building their own differentiated IP, or they're building a solution on Google clouds platform that leverages our platform. So I think that's that's going to continue to be the key. Because, you know, Google's approach is that we want to enable our customers to be multi cloud, hybrid cloud, right? We don't want to lock customers in. And you have, we've all seen the trend in the last, you know, five to seven years that customer no law. Customers no longer want to make a bet on, you know, on, on one vendor lockdown. They want to have the ability to make certain decisions and have flexibility. And so I think it just, it just makes sense, you know, from how we're engaging with the partner on, you know, what our customers are looking for, and aligning the two things together.

Chip Rodgers  22:26  
That's terrific. So the when they're when, I mean, again, what a great story for for a partner, I assume that as when you have those really great, you know, use cases and stories where the partner has really invested, right? They've invested to build capability, then you help them go to market, both with with customers, but also, you know, enablement in the field,

Samrah Khan  22:53  
yeah, you know. So absolutely right. So the partners that are investing in building differentiated solutions with Google Cloud, that are investing in putting together the, you know, the Google Cloud business unit, as we call it, or Google GBU. There is reciprocity from the Google side, right? We're intentional in in that region, in managing those partners with, you know, assigned folks named folks that they work with on day to day basis. We insert and we, you know, support them by measuring our our folks internally, on the performance, on how the partnership is doing overall. We have marketing and funding dollars to give to the partners that support that, you know, marketing plan that you know, feeds into the go to into the go to market. And then we have various different programs and tools and incentives, you know, whether it's deal acceleration fund before the pre sales to do workshop and POC, or, you know, post sales funding for implementation and stuff like that. So we have, we have incentives around that. And then if we are looking at any specific place, or, you know, like maybe VMware or Oracle, or something like that, then we have specific incentives around that for partners that are really focused on on those specific place. So I think there is a wide variety of incentives and marketing dollars and funding involved to support the overall business plan that we put together with that with a partner.

Chip Rodgers  24:23  
That's amazing. So maybe one more topic around, you know, working with partners at Google. How? Let's talk about measurement, like, how do you measure partners? And how do you measure your own impact? You know, the impact the partners are having with Google, yeah,

Samrah Khan  24:42  
so, you know, it all ties back to the three priorities that that Google Cloud has. So, you know, in order for us to measure the relationship with the partner, obviously it's a it's a partnership. So it's a two way street, right? We keep an eye on from the partners per. Perspective how their services revenue is growing with, you know, with Google Cloud, obviously that's very important. We want to, we want to make sure our partners that are making a bet on us are successful from Google's perspective. We align to the three priorities, and we look at which are the partners that are helping us. You know, with net new logo acquisition, which ones are the partners that are driving consumption, so, you know, actual revenues for us, and which ones are the partners that are really focused on driving the AI business with us and that revenue associated with us. So those are pretty straightforward, three metrics that we measure our partners on, that we measure our team on, and everybody's aligned, you know, align behind it and get it like some smaller sub components, but broadly speaking, those are the metrics and the services revenue for the partner

Chip Rodgers  25:47  
makes complete sense and it aligns with the business. What could be better?

Samrah Khan  25:52  
Nothing.

Chip Rodgers  25:56  
Well, Samra, this has been fantastic. First of all, I also would love to chat with you a little bit about the women of MENA in technology. You've been a board member now for five years. Tremendous organization. I think it 100,000 members, which is, you know, globally, and just amazing. And congrats. First of all, tell me a little bit about

Samrah Khan  26:17  
it. Yeah, you know, you know, I've always been a big proponent of women in tech in general, and I've been I've been part of various different agencies or groups or, you know, or nonprofits throughout my my life, and supported the initiative in a different way. I remember when I made a conscious decision to come to Google Cloud few years, few years ago, I had committed to myself that I would use Google's platform to supporting the initiative for for women in tech and, you know, in general, and that has many forms. It's about, it's about education, enablement, funding, entrepreneurship, you know, mentoring, networking. So there's many aspects to many aspects to it. And you know, with one woman of MENA in tech, which is Middle East and North African, I think, is a very underrepresented community, like, if you look at some of the stats, significant portion of women in Middle East and North America North Africa graduate with computer science or engineering or STEM degree. However, the in the workplace, their representation is really, really low. And so when I was looking at different organizations, you know, I was trying to figure out, Where can I go that's underrepresented, where I can make an impact, where people are not doing enough, and that's how, sort of I got involved, initially as a volunteer, you know, based out of San Francisco, and then eventually committed to being a board member. And, you know, we, we do, we do several different events throughout the year, as well as various we run various different initiatives throughout the year where that involve the uplifting and upbringing of women in tech in general. And I think, you know, in addition to that, outside of that, I'm involved with other organizations, like in next month, I'm hosting an event at at Google for Anita b.org I'm not sure if you have heard, heard of Grace Hopper, yes, yeah, by any chance. So we're doing, you know, women in tech, empowering women in tech, and being limitless, event where some of the Google execs are also participating and supporting so, yeah. I mean, you know, whatever I can do to to to help, because I'm a recipient of support throughout my career from various different folks, and I think it's, it's important to give back to the community. And Google has, you know, has been tremendous, and giving me both space and and support and being able to make it so couldn't have done it without the without the company.

Chip Rodgers  29:03  
That's fantastic. That's fantastic summer. Thank you so much for taking some time today and sharing all the amazing things going on with with SI Partners with Google. And this has been fantastic.

Samrah Khan  29:16  
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was great talking to you.

Chip Rodgers  29:20  
So thank you all as well for joining another episode of Inside partnering, and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody.

Samrah Khan  29:31  
All right, DC.

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