What are the key things to keep in mind when building out an ecosystem? Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP at Google Cloud, speaks with host Avanish Sahai about the nuances of building partner relationships and creating the most value for customers, partners, and the platform. Kevin draws on his extensive experience in the field to tell us about the tactics and mindset that help facilitate a truly successful platform business.
In the Season 2 premiere of The Platform Journey, Avanish and Kevin discuss:
Guest: Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP at Google Cloud
Kevin Ichhpurani is Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem and Business Development at Google Cloud. Kevin brings nearly 25 years of experience in the technology industry leading global strategy, platform ecosystem transformation, venture capital and mergers and acquisitions. Most recently, Kevin served as Executive Vice President and Corporate Officer of GE. Prior to GE Digital Kevin was a Senior Partner, Global Markets at Ernst and Young and before Ernst and Young Kevin served at SAP as Executive Vice President, Head of Business Development and Global Ecosystem. Kevin holds an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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Avanish: Hello and good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to season two of The Platform Journey. It’s been really fun to have these conversations, and I could not be more excited about our guest today, Kevin Ichhpurani. Kevin is a dear friend—and my former boss, but we won’t hold that against him. [Laughs] Kevin and I worked together at Google Cloud, and he now has a bigger role than he had even when we worked together as the Corporate VP of the Ecosystem and Channels teams at Google Cloud.
Kevin, first of all, thank you, and welcome. Just give us a bit of your personal background. You’ve got such an amazing history - can you give us a bit of your personal background?
Kevin: Thank you, Avanish. It’s great to be here with you today. It has been an exciting journey here at Google Cloud. It’s been almost five years, where we started off with a few billion in revenue, and now have an over 25 billion run rate with a 50 billion backlog.
It’s an interesting journey, because Google has been operating data centers at scale since 2003. There’s over 40,000 search queries that happen every second. Over a third of the world’s internet traffic goes through our backbone every day. And we’ve been delivering this same infrastructure to our enterprise customers. Although we’ve been operating with tremendous scale for some time, we were, candidly, late in scaling our go-to-market. Under Thomas Kurian’s leadership over the last four-plus years, we’ve made very significant progress, and have won many of the largest customers in the world.
To answer your question, prior to what I was doing here at Google Cloud—where I run the ecosystem and channel organization—I had a very similar role at GE Digital, leading the ecosystem and channel and emerging solutions group. I was also at SAP for about 12 years, running the ecosystem, large enterprise channels, and innovation activities for the company.
Avanish: Obviously a fantastic background for a conversation like this. So, Kevin, the focus here is, as you might guess, platforms and ecosystems. We think of them as two sides of the same coin, right? There’s a platform strategy, and from there an ecosystem strategy. 02:35 What’s your assessment of the current platform and ecosystem strategy for Google Cloud? I think it is a unique story—talk a bit about how it came about. What are the origins of that strategy?
Kevin: Well, it’s an interesting question. When you think of the origins, Google has a long history of building platforms and ecosystems—starting with what we did on the adtech side, bringing together the market-leading platforms to bring advertisers and publishers together. A vibrant ecosystem economy came out of that. You can look at what we did with Android, with over 6 million developers, and now 3.5 million applications that are being distributed via the Google Play Store. There are countless other examples, like building platforms, like Chrome OS, or like Maps, where you have a vibrant ecosystem of companies that have built businesses on top.
Our strategy has always been about this: building open platforms that ecosystems can thrive and monetize on. A similar principle applies with Google Cloud, even though it’s on the enterprise side. If you took a consumer analogy—like, let’s say you have an Apple iOS device. You wouldn’t spend over a thousand dollars on that phone if it wasn’t for the applications that are on top. That’s what drives value in the underlying platform.
A similar principle applies in enterprise. The Google Cloud platform or workspace are fundamentally platforms, and the value of the platform is the ecosystem of ISVs and IP that you bring in on top. That is why we’re so committed to this. Whether a solution is complementary or even overlapping with Google, we fundamentally embrace those technologies that build on the platform, and give them unfettered access to our underlying services. 04:38 We believe open platforms are the ones that win in the market.
Avanish: Love it. I think that analogy is spot on; that’s one that everybody understands. But how that plays out in the enterprise is really what this is about. You started to talk about the various types of applications and services. What are the different types of partners that you and your team are recruiting, onboarding, and then working with in Google Cloud? Do you believe that you’ve achieved the balance that you need, or is that something that’s going to be changing over time?
Kevin: You know, it’s an interesting point, change over time. We absolutely see a unique evolution happening. I mentioned the various partner types—ISVs being one category—where our goal is to provide customer choice but also to meet customers where they are. Some customers will use our technology or services for dev ops, or for ETL capabilities—or they’ll use our partner technologies.
We want to fundamentally meet the customer where they are, and have ready-to-run capabilities on the platform to make it more simple to use. We’re working with an array of largest-size, smallest-size to provide the deep domain expertise helpful for successful customer go-lives. We are working with a broad range of channel partners who provide us with sales coverage around the globe. We’re really working with those partners to transform them into sales and service because, fundamentally, customers are looking for more of an MSP-type structure in the cloud.
Now, what’s unique is that when you look at all those partners, content partners, and the customers that will also co-innovate with us, lines are blurring on the traditional ISV versus an SI. Many SIs are actually reselling our capabilities as part of a managed service offering. They’re not just doing pure implementation; they’re building IP because they want to actually monetize to their IP, more like an ISV. We look at partners differently today, and don’t put them in the same boxes as you would have years ago. We also see that partnering is less about monolithic one-to-one relationships and more about how you build a network effect of many partners working together to solve a customer problem.
We do a portfolio analysis. We look at every industry, and we build what we call an industry value network. It starts with finding the industry pain points. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, one question is how to accelerate drug discovery right now. Or in retail banking, we might look at how to manage challenges around anti-money laundering. 07:32 We look at where the big industry pain points are to decide what it is that we’re going to build on our roadmap, and where there are white spaces where we don’t plan to go. Where can we co-innovate with partners to build an end-to-end solution?
I’ll give you an example. If you look at the consumer products industry right now, many CPG companies are struggling with optimizing inventory in real time, with all the supply and demand side shocks that are happening right now. The challenge is that there are a set of critical content partners that are needed to solve this problem. Data is sitting in point of sales systems, CRM systems, and supply chain ERP systems. 08:14 So, we’ve really brought a network of ISVs in all of those categories together—as well as content partners and services partners—to piece together what we call the cortex industry value network, which allows us real-time optimization. We’ve delivered this to multiple CP customers already. We see this as the future of partnering: really building a network to solve the problem. It’s one plus one equals three. And we’re doing this in all of our key focused industries.
Avanish: As always, I think you bring it to life in a way that’s very distinctive. Anybody can relate to those challenges, because those really are the problems that the industry is facing, right?
It’s been a fantastic growth journey. You described some of that growth in the beginning of your introduction. But it’s not always easy. What are some of the challenges? As you build a platform and build a strategy, what gets in the way sometimes?
Kevin: That’s a great question. I think, fundamentally, one of the important things when building a platform is the cultural transformation that has to happen. When I think of the different companies I’ve been at—I’ll use SAP as an example. It was a big cultural transformation, going from being just an application company to being an application-and-platform company. We had to get very comfortable with the fact that competitors were going to build on our platform. I think SAP did a remarkable job of making that transition. 09:45 But whether it's SAP or Google Cloud or GE Digital, you have to embrace “coopetition.” You have to make sure that you’re providing transparency to your partners on your roadmap, so they can know, with a high degree of confidence, that you are not going to enter their space and compete with them on the ground. And even if you are going to compete with them, you have to ensure that you embrace coopetition—that they can build on your platform and have unfettered access to your underlying service, just like it’s a Google product.
We fundamentally have embraced that. We believe open platforms are the ones that win in the market. If you are going to overlap with a partner in some way, you have to let them know that they will continue to work with you at a platform level. You have to be very transparent about where you’re going to compete, from a sales perspective, and where you’re going to collaborate. 10:48 It’s totally appropriate to tell a partner, “We’re completely open at a platform level and you will never be disadvantaged, but we’re going to compete on the ground.” That level of transparency is absolutely critical.
The second thing is really creating that internal culture of innovation—that as part of a broader company strategy, you’re going to be a building block, an orchestrator of end-to-end solutions. 11:12 These are some really important core tenets. These are the things that many companies struggle with when they become platform companies, that are really important to get right.
Avanish: Yeah. Very thoughtful. As an infrastructure service, primarily, with a variety of services in so many different categories, how do you get your partners—the variety of your partners—to be comfortable with the fact that the Google Cloud platform is going to be a component of their final solution? It’s not the end all, be all. How do you work with them to align on that front?
Kevin: Working specifically with the partner community, and how you get them comfortable?
Kevin: You know, I think the most important thing is the inverse of what we just talked about—really having a candid dialogue with the partners on what’s core and what’s context. For example, our goal is to be the best technology platform for customers to build on.
Take a perfect example: business applications. We have many of the leading business applications in the world that are working with and building on our platform. We’re not going to build the entire end-to-end business process; we want to be the enabling platform underneath. 12:42 You have to have a very candid dialogue with the partner that their business process is what’s core and differentiating; the technology platform is context for them as a business application provider. That’s where we will serve them. Understanding that core and context layer, and making sure that you have a very candid dialogue with the partner so they understand it, is super important.
It’s also important to help partners understand how you build and have a platform strategy that allows you to continue to innovate, but also operate in a multi-cloud world. The customers of many of our ISVs that are building on our platform are expecting them to be multi-cloud. On one hand, they want to leverage all the innovations of the platform, but on the other, they need to be highly portable. 13:41 Our strategy has been very unique in that we truly embrace multi-cloud. For example, you can build an application on Google Cloud where, without changing a single line of code, you can run on multiple clouds—or you can run on-prem. If you’re using our analytics capabilities, you don’t have to move all the data to Google Cloud. Why should it be something as technical as provisioning a VM actually requires you to change lines of code? That openness and that portability is super critical. We fundamentally believe this is very important, because customers and partners need this level of portability. And we are embracing that.
Avanish: Yeah. I love how you make it super simple and easy… I mean, there’s a lot of complexity behind that construct, but I think the simplicity of the messaging is fantastic.
You’ve been at some of the leading brands and companies in the world: SAP, GE, EY, and Google Cloud now. I’m sure this is a question you get a lot over dinners, but let’s share it with the broader group here. Let’s say I’m an ISV. I’m just starting on my own platform journey, and I’m thinking about how I’m going to sit on top of one of the multi-infrastructure players—but I think I have a platform opportunity. What’s your advice to me? How do I go about this? How do I get started on this journey, and what do I need to be thinking about?
Kevin: I think there are a number of things that are really important when making a platform decision for an ISV. Of course, there’s the technical due diligence. Assuming that’s completed, I think it’s really important to understand the strategy of the platform provider.
Number one, you want 100% assurance that, even if you enter into a competitive situation with that platform provider, you’ll never be disadvantaged vis-à-vis its own products, and that you’ll always have access to its underlying services. Make sure your application can be highly performant, highly secure, and running on the platform. The technology collaboration is an absolute must, regardless of any kind of competitive dynamic. 16:08 That’s one thing that’s very important.
The second thing is understanding distribution. How do I make money by building on this platform? Our stance at Google Cloud is that when a company lists on our marketplace, they can actually benefit from the distribution capability of Google to get to our customers. For example, if they list on our marketplace, and a customer searches and discovers that solution, they can actually buy that solution and burn their commitment they have with Google Cloud, dollar for dollar, just like it’s a Google product. We think that’s very unique. We compensate our reps for many of the solutions, or do digital demand generation campaigns together with those ISVs, in order to get them access to our customers. It’s important to understand the distribution capability.
The third thing worth highlighting, that I mentioned before, is ensuring that you have the balance between leveraging those services that are highly differentiating on the platform, and operating within the need for a multi-cloud world. We see the vast majority of partners and customers going multi-cloud and really making sure that they choose an architecture that allows zero lock-in. That’s another area where we feel we’re very unique. We think this is really important in the decision-making process for choosing a platform.
Avanish: Kevin, I can’t thank you enough. Huge amount of thoughtfulness and insight in how you share your perspectives. Any final thoughts, suggestions, or recommendations, as people think about their journeys, that you want to share?
Kevin: Another other thing that I believe is really important to consider, when you think about the future of partnering, is the notion of industry value networks. It’s so important to not only look at the partnership with your platform provider, but how you can partner with their ecosystem. That’s where the really powerful aspects come from—this network effect to solve a business problem.
Thank you, Avanish. I’ve really enjoyed participating today, and it’s wonderful seeing you again. I look forward to participating again in the future.
Avanish: Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. I really appreciate the time.
Kevin: Thank you.