An Ultimate Guide to Partnering® 4th of July Cross Pod Takeover!

Wondering what role the three cloud hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft, and Google can play in your partner strategy? Today I’m sharing an episode of my fellow podcast host’s, Rob Spee‘s Channel Journey’s podcast where I’m along with Paul Bird of the Ultimate Channel Sales podcast, for a channel panel chat. We talk about the impact of hyperscalers on the partner ecosystem, why they are so important, and some things you need to know to be successful. 

What You’ll Learn

• Cloud and Everything-As-a-Service technologies, along with consumer online shopping, have changed IT buying behavior. Customers aren’t looking to buy technology, they’re buying a solution to a problem. 
  
• IT infrastructure that used to take a week to set up can now be purchased at the click of buy button on a cloud hyperscaler marketplace.
  
•  Partnering with Microsoft, AWS, and Google on their marketplace not only gives you access to their sales organizations, but also their customers’ budgets. These three hyperscalers hold an aggregated $200 billion in customer cloud commitments they can burn down that commitment on partner solutions.
  
• Partnering with a cloud hyperscaler effectively is about co-marketing, co-selling, and co-innovating. 
  
• We’re in the infancy of generative AI, like we were twenty years ago with smart phones. Technology like Chat GPT being developed by the hyperscalers is going to change IT solutions and the partner landscape in ways we can’t even imagine. 
  
• With the rising success of the the hyperscaler marketplaces, distributors are evolving to find their place as in the ecosystem. They’re learning more and more to service delivery and being the ecosystem orchestrators.
  

Exclusively Sponsored By “Winning with Ecosystems” – An Ultimate Partner LIVE Event.

I’m excited to announce Ultimate Partner’s first live digital event “Winning with Ecosystems” taking place on July 20. A production with LLTV and in partnership with Tackle, this event will feature Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to Cloud GTM and Ecosystem Led Growth. As a unique “companion event” to the Microsoft Inspire conference, you will learn how to apply the principles and learnings to achieve your greatest results in FY24. Registration is limited, SIGN UP before its too late!

On becoming, The Ultimate Partner™

At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, who drive the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems.

With this exciting new Masterclass Series, Ultimate Partnerships becomes The Ultimate Partner™ More than just a new look, Ultimate Partner is doubling its commitment to helping YOU become the Ultimate Partner by getting it right. Do you want to be The Ultimate Partner? Visit our NEW website.

Why Ultimate Partner?

Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth.

Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® -, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success.

In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead.

Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?”

If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise.

Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partner, ecosystem, hyper scalars, channel, marketplaces, people, technology, talk, years, ai, gpt, vince, event, business, microsoft, customer, journeys, paul, point, driving

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Paul Bird, Vince Menzione, Rob Spee

Announcer  00:00

This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  00:19

And last week’s episode, we talked about marketplaces, and how to tap into the $200 billion cloud opportunity, working with the leading cloud providers like Microsoft, Google and Amazon. And today, I’m joined by two amazing podcast friends. Rob’s be the host of the channel journeys podcast, who leads this discussion. And Paul Byrd of the ultimate Channel Sales podcast. In this episode, hosted by Rob SPIE, we have an engaging dialogue on the impact of the hyperscalers on the partner ecosystem, why they are so important, and what we all need to know to be more successful. I hope you enjoy this episode. As much as I enjoyed spending time with two amazing friends.

Rob Spee  01:08

Hey, Paul, Vince buddies, how you doing?

Paul Bird  01:11

Doing well.

Vince Menzione  01:12

So good to be here, my friend.

Rob Spee  01:15

This is the the friend chat of the channels getting back together again, on the channel journeys platform. This time, we’re kind of bouncing around, but really happy to be back with you guys. And let’s just have a fun conversation. Thought we talk about ecosystems and hyperscalers this time, so we’ll see where that takes us. We can talk about anything. There are no rules on this show today.

Paul Bird  01:37

Perfect. It’s great to be back and great not to be asking the questions today.

Vince Menzione  01:42

Same here, and so good to see you too. Like this is a lot of fun.

Rob Spee  01:46

It is a lot of fun. Vince, you’ve been busy. Paul, I know you’ve been busy. We’ve all been super busy. Who isn’t these days, a lot going on a lot of fun things happening in the partnering world that we’re all getting engaged in. So we can just kind of chat about that and see where it’s going. So we’re all heavily involved in the ecosystems hyperscalers are playing a big role on that. I’m curious, first of all, from your perspective, at Magento bricks, what impact this is having that you’re seeing on your business, your partnerships?

Paul Bird  02:13

Well, I think what we’re seeing when it comes to new people coming in evaluating Magento bricks is that the one size fits all model of the past is really no longer applicable. They’re now looking at how do they work with different personas, how do they involve multiple touch points within an individual sale, the multiple points of value as Jay always talks about her influence, but also involving customers as well. So they need to find an ecosystem that not only caters to transactional partners, but then the CO innovation partners, I did a podcast with Tim over at Red Hat on this, but then also to be able to bring in the customer experience as well. So they can kind of do a full loop on the, you know, the CSAT scores and everything when it comes to the the customer benefit of all of this. And that’s a challenge to find a platform that can handle all of it. Fortunately, Magento tricks, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. We’ve been at it for 12 years now. So but it’s a it’s a take I haven’t seen in the last seven years. So and this is really being driven by the age of the ecosystem.

Rob Spee  03:21

I was trying to explain this at my company, kind of what’s different, right? We’ve always had resellers, far VADs service delivery partners, GSI hyperscalers, have even been around quite a while. Vince, what do you think is really different now than before.

Vince Menzione  03:37

So first off, I think that certainly in the last few years, right? Since COVID, there’s been an acceleration in our lives in the way we buy things in terms of the technology, the adoption rate is off the charts. And buying behaviors have also changed dramatically. So that it’s not the IT shop, that’s only making the decision, it’s the line of business owner. And those people are making a decision like they purchase a car, right, they’re talking to the J likes to talk about the seven seats at the table and that influence strategy surrounding it. It’s also finally becoming understood that it’s not a transaction, and you’re not just buying a widget, you’re buying a complete solution to a problem that might include the cloud, it might include a beyond trust solution, it might include some other stitching or software coming from a partner. And that doesn’t happen alone. It doesn’t happen in a one and done type of manner. So bringing along the ecosystem. In other words, bring the ecosystem is really what the customer thinks the ecosystem is, right? Who are those seven partners or organizations that are coming together to influence and build that complete solution? That’s number one. The second thing we’re seeing is the hyperscalers. That yes, they’ve been around for a while I was with Microsoft for almost 10 years. The cloud first of all the aggregation the technology just the build out these massive data centers. It’s not for the faint I mean, the man massive investments required, there’s only a few companies that can do it. Right. So the big three, mostly, you’ll see a little bit more of Oracle. But now the technology at this layered on top of that, and layer on top of that Gen AI, and there is an aggregation of data, all the aggregation is happening amongst the top three. And then everyone else is basically taking advantage of their rails right there, you’re coming onto their rails and taking advantage of whether it’s Gen AI, or whatever the technology is on their cloud, as an ISV as an SI. So it’s got to all come together. So you’ve got to work with your hyperscalers more succinctly. And then you also need to work with your we used to call channel right chattel journeys, but it’s now an ecosystem, you got to bring all those things together as one.

Rob Spee  05:41

Yeah, I’m not changing at the ecosystem journeys yet. That’s so

Vince Menzione  05:45

good. I don’t want you to be trendy.

Rob Spee  05:48

I can’t be too faddish or trendy, exactly. No. But it’s interesting, because I think you’re right. I think a lot of what’s changing is the buyer behavior, right, as you said, because of the SAS offerings and the way that the transaction isn’t as important and the ways that they can buy today, the buyer behavior has changed, which is required the need for this orchestrated ecosystem approach. I’m not sure what the chicken or the egg is, because it was the advancement in technology that did also change the buyer behavior. Yes,

Paul Bird  06:16

absolutely. And I look back 20 years ago working for one of the first compact resellers in Canada. And for me to be able to deploy a workload, the amount of people I had to work with, as far as you know, acquiring the physical hardware, from distribution to you know, having it shipped to our office, whether it was dropped shift, or we went and picked it up to actually setting up and configuring the OS on all of this, the security, I mean, this was not an easy task, like, if you want it to get, you know, even a database server or web application server running, this was a week long project, I can do this in minutes now with hyperscalers. So you know that last, you know, when I first was exposed to this type of technology at scale, this was a process. And there were a lot of people involved in order to deliver an application like this. Now, if the buy button can be clicked by anybody, regardless if it’s the partner, regardless if it’s the end user or a service provider in the middle, and that those, you know, this ecosystem of hyper scalars. And all of the other components of it, the people haven’t changed, just the deployment and the acquisition have changed. So it really is an exciting time to be involved in in the ecosystem, watching the hyperscalers work. And then for us at magenta bricks, where we’re really focused on the you know, that endpoint communication with partners, you know, other stakeholders of the ecosystem, customers and driving the best experience like a true personalized experience that provides value. And this isn’t the old partner portal that we saw five years ago, or 10 years ago, this is now about adding value. And then bringing in all the components that we’re seeing from the hyperscalers and other components of the ecosystem as well.

Rob Spee  08:05

Yeah, you’re talking about partner experience, customer experience, that’s been our real mantra and focus at our company. It’s product experience, customer experience, partner experience, all of that, right, and employee experience as well. And you mentioned change, you know, people haven’t changed, but so much has changed that we’ve got to change as people and adopt to and that’s, maybe we’ll even get into that the whole change management side of this is really challenging.

Vince Menzione  08:29

Well, Paul just mentioned the buy button. And yeah, maybe this is a this is leading into what we’re going to talk about next. But the buy button is that marketplace. And what you’re starting to see and it’s really getting driven from the hyper scalars on down is that this adoption of marketplaces Canalis says 45 billion will flow through marketplaces by the end of 2025 80% of that will go through the three hyperscalers and they are driving behavior now. Microsoft’s gonna have its big Microsoft inspire conference July 18, the 19th tea leaves say that there’s going to be some announcements around marketplaces like that’s going to be more of a prevalent thing next year. So I hear and they’re driving it for a lot of reasons. First of all, it’s access to their sales organization. It’s accessed to the durable cloud budgets, the three hyperscalers aggregated have $200 billion in cloud commitments with customers. Yeah, so. And if you have a marketplace offer with any of those three, you can burn down that commitment. The customer does not have to do a cash outlay, especially now during this time of economic headwinds, I can access what’s already been committed to my hyper scalar to purchase a beyond trust solution. Isn’t that great? Right?

Rob Spee  09:40

It is great. You know, we are beyond trust. We’ve now gotten ourselves up on the Azure Marketplace and the AWS Marketplace. What we’re learning though, is just because you build it, they don’t necessarily come right. It just doesn’t happen automatically. There’s a lot of work you’ve got to do to get that motion flowing and the motion flowing with the hyper scalar right the CO selling the coma Marketing, even co innovation that’s possible. And Vince, that’s an area that you’re really focusing on, aren’t you to to help companies with this?

Vince Menzione  10:06

Oh, I love this question. Right. So we made a big announcement just last week, and we are going to be hosting an event a companion event, ultimate partner is pivoting to media events and advisory firm. And recognizing that the hyperscalers do play such a prevalent role is ecosystem. But most people are not looking at that holistically. So we’re trying to bring it all together, we’re going to do our first event with Microsoft. And we hope to do events with the other other too. And the whole idea is to bring the

Rob Spee  10:37

playing favorites, you’re gonna you’re gonna work with everyone, we’re going to work with everyone. All right,

Vince Menzione  10:41

but Microsoft’s conference came up first. So right after inspire the day, after we’re going to host a companion event, winning with ecosystems, it will actually feature executives for Microsoft, we’re gonna have several, both fireside chats and panel discussions. And we’re going to take what Microsoft just said the day before, and apply it to helping partners land Microsoft, or make make it more relevant to their strategies, so they can be successful in 2024. And this is a digital event, it is a digital event, I did want to do a live event transparency was there was no location that made sense, given travel budgets, and timing for this year. But stay tuned, we’re going to do

Rob Spee  11:25

that you’re gonna say there’s no venue big enough to hold the crowd that’s gonna come to you?

Paul Bird  11:29

Well, you know, I think it’s a topic that people really need to be listening to. And I think your timing of this announcement is key, because I still think that there is a large segment of the the at least in the technology sector that doesn’t fully understand and appreciate the how the ecosystem is going to change and evolve their business. And, you know, it becomes a catchphrase that people are looking at and they don’t really fully understand and appreciate it. So I think that coming off an Inspire conference, if you can actually educate and give real actionable items, you know, a live event would have been great, because hearing you speak is fantastic. But really even a digital event will enable a lot of people. So if they haven’t signed up for it, I recommend that they do.

Vince Menzione  12:13

We’ll put a link in the show notes, right?

Rob Spee  12:14

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And when is that? It is July 20? July 20. Let’s see. Yes, I’m still in town. Good. Good.

Vince Menzione  12:24

Well, we’d love to have you there. And you have been to one of my events before Rob. So it was fantastic. Yeah, it was very, we’re everything that up. So some of the players, some more executive level people from Microsoft, very senior people at Microsoft. Yeah, we’re gonna be part of this.

Rob Spee  12:38

Yeah, I think it’s fascinating. And you know, a lot of people are just kind of getting into this. But there’s so much that can be done. And we were at the Executive Briefing Center of one of our partners recently. And we were talking about CO selling, of course, and that’s kind of where people first go to. But there’s so much more that can be done on the CO marketing side, but also on the CO innovation side. And you talked about the technology advances of the hyper scalars and what they’ve built. And there are so many ways that I hadn’t even thought of that other ISPs can actually tack onto that and accelerate innovation by leveraging their technology.

Vince Menzione  13:11

Yeah, absolutely. This is that’s what I’m saying. With regards to Gen AI. It’s, it’s it’s taking the first of all the time to get to market. I know Paul has some a point of view on this as well from what Magento Trix has done, but it’s going to accelerate time to market, it’s going to accelerate a lot of things that we haven’t even thought about yet in terms of the relationship between the ISV and their solution set and hyperscalers capabilities

Rob Spee  13:35

broadly. You know, when marketplaces came out, multiple parties were really fearful of this taking over their business and pushing them out. First, the resellers and partners. What are you seeing Paul, in your in your customer community on that front?

Paul Bird  13:48

Well, you know, you talk about the change in technology, just as it applies to hyper scalars in the last short period of time. And now we are in the infancy of generative AI, I think back and in 2000, which is my God, 23 years ago, I got my first BlackBerry, it ran on a double A battery, it was the greatest device I had ever had in the world. Now, fast forward 20 plus years later, not only is that also just completely out of date and irrelevant anymore, but how far we’ve come when it comes to mobile computing. So let’s take this same and apply it to now what open AI what Microsoft is doing, what Google is doing with Bard. What is this going to look like in two years from now, five years from now 20 years from now, this is going to change our landscape. And if the technology is evolving as quick as if chat GPT or any generative AI evolves at the same rate as technology, which I don’t think it will, they’re going to be a lot faster. This is going to change your entire landscape in a very short period of time well within our lifetimes. So from a magenta perspective, we were the first ones to integrate open AI into our PRM. And first thing we did. So this is an easy one, nobody wants to log into a partner portal anymore. So you know what, just copied on the conversation that you’re going to have with the channel manager GPT will go grab everything registered the deal on your behalf, and just send you a confirmation that it’s done with a link to it. And that’s been working Fantastic. Now we’re evaluating what else can we do with this? How can we enable partner ecosystems to leverage this as almost digital labor? You know, offering predictive deep analytics into historical opportunities, and then prompt the partner with the right collateral at the right point in the sales cycle, follow up with the partner in the ecosystem to say, Have you made any progress, find that X number of days go by and you start losing your opportunity to close the deal? What else can we leverage this for? And again, we’re in the infancy it hasn’t even been out six? Well, it’s been at what, seven months so far. And I think that we’re just seeing the very early on application. But it is an exciting point to be involved in this, this vertical and seeing how this is going to affect our lives. I think it’s going to be in a positive way. Yeah,

Rob Spee  16:18

it’s who knows. I mean, it’s just, it’s frightening and exciting of what could potentially come in the next couple of years with us, right? That’s

Vince Menzione  16:24

Yes. And one of the sessions we’re going to have is on generative AI. Are you at the event? Yeah, we have Microsoft coming into the room, both the business applications and the modern work team together to talk about this future of co pilot and generative AI and what it can do to streamline you know, as Paul was just discussing here with with his application, but think about all the things we do from a single plant pane of glass. Yeah, business applications like CRM, or office 365. And we’re all the things that we can do with AI layered on top of that.

Rob Spee  16:58

Yeah, I was I was wondering, Vince, with all the time you’re spending with these hyper scalars? Are you getting a sense of where they’re going, not just in developing the technology, which they’re all doing, but using the technology? You know, other folks are figuring out ways to use this, like, oh, but what are the hyperscalers planning to do with it? Well, I

Vince Menzione  17:13

was at Google’s event, just back last month, I speak at their ISP forum, and I got to hear directly from Google’s leadership on the AI side, about some of the innovation going on, you know, they were sort of in the shadows of this chat, GBT thing, right. And maybe people thought they missed the mark, but they are coming on really strong. I’ve tried. I’ve been using both Bart and Jack GBT myself, I like them both. But Google came from search. They came from machine learning and AI. And so they’ve got a lot to share their layer. They’re also layer in into their business applications, their strategies, their vertical approaches, you know, across financial services, healthcare and the like. So they’re not sleeping at the wheel. I’m sure not interesting, as AWS has been a little quiet. I haven’t heard much from them yet. But everything that the retail side of the house is built on is really machine learning and AI. So interesting to see what’s going to happen.

Rob Spee  18:09

Yeah, it is very interesting. You wonder where it’s where it’s going to take us. Hey, Vince, have you tried using chat GBT yet to write your show notes?

Vince Menzione  18:17

I have I have, I would say to a limited success. Not too bad. Like, I’ll take some things out of it. I have used it more for LinkedIn posts. Have you end it? Yeah. And you know what I did today, I had a thought on my ride my bike ride this morning. And I came back and I said write me an article about this subject. And it wrote, I haven’t fully read it yet. But it’s it wrote a really fabulous piece. Taking into consideration the whole topic matter. It’s like, yeah, that was actually scary to see.

Rob Spee  18:47

It is scary. I keep forgetting to use it. I don’t know what you guys,

Paul Bird  18:51

you know, I hope that we can, as we evolve with the you know, and begin to interact with these types of tasking components like generative AI and chat GPT, that we also start to learn from them as well. Because there was a book I read a few years ago by a gentleman by the name of Tim Hudson called think better. And though it really challenged you to go beyond your initial thought process to get your brain working. And one of the examples he’s had is, you know, pick a topic, give me 10 things 10, your top 10 thoughts, top 10 colors, go ahead and pick 10. And then after you’re done the 10 do 10 more. Now, if we asked Chet GPT to it, it can start running off 1000s in a row. But for for us after we get to 10 becomes a little bit more difficult. We actually have to think so what I’m hoping as the technology evolves that not only will it make some of the more mundane tasks are a little easier, but educate us to become more knowledgeable about specific subjects and not just do it for us. So that’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I know that at magenta x as we’re looking to automate this, we really want to make the partner account managers job easier. But at the same time, we want to educate people using chat GPT, to provide them the insights and the analytics that are more than just what you would see on the surface. So it again, I think it’s going to be an interesting time to see how we do it. And I use it all the time I use it, I think it’s great for creating a framework. But then I will always go and tweak the information. I haven’t done my show notes on with Chad GPT. But I do end up you know, if I’ve got a want to phrase an idea in an email or within a presentation a little bit better, I’ll run it through chat GPT, ask it to make it easier to understand. And it does a great job of doing what I asked it to.

Rob Spee  20:51

Yeah, and I think that’s a really good hope that it makes us smarter, not dumber, right? We just kind of lean on and let it do all the thinking for us.

Paul Bird  20:58

Exactly. You know, I’m

Vince Menzione  21:00

always brought back to the conversations we were having when the web first started up, right when the internet first became a thing. And everybody started putting up a website and a homepage and a sales page and saying that sales was going to go away. And it never did, right. It just it enabled sellers to become more effective at what they were doing. Right. Yeah. And I hope that’s the case here. And I believe it is my daughter is a senior copywriter for a FinTech company. And I think it’s going to make her job easier, but it’s not going to replace her job. Because there’s still first of all, there’s the human element that it doesn’t have. Yeah, doesn’t necessarily show that human emotion plus, again, like Paul said, it’s, it’s a way to frame up, maybe a topic not completed and not to do it on your behalf. Yeah,

Rob Spee  21:46

well, let’s pivot. I want to talk about distribution, and hyperscalers. Because that is definitely kind of a collision point right now, from what I’m seeing, you know, in the marketplace, and distributors seem to be pivoting a bit and positioning themselves as the ecosystem orchestrator. But what does that mean? And what is their role versus the marketplace? And how do they can they coexist?

Vince Menzione  22:07

This is a loaded question. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. And what I will say is, I do believe there’s a level of reinvention that is going to continue to have to happen for the distribution, where they of course, you know, it was credit, it was delivery, describing that Compaq computer, they had it on the shelf, and they could send it to Paul, that’s what and the value was that they could provide credit to you. And that’s the way it started out in the day, right? They were aggregators, the cloud has, what they’ve been to the hyperscalers has been the scale element, the longtail I like to refer to it as right. So who are the hundreds of 1000s of mystical VARs, MSPs, you know, systems and everyone down the chain down to the customer in Sheboygan and activating them on technology and activating them on incentives and so on and so on. But does that change with marketplace? That’s the question, do they have a vital role in aggregating marketplaces? Hard to say, it’s hard to say, for me at this point? Yeah,

Paul Bird  23:11

well, maybe not in the North American market, but maybe in the APAC, you know, other regions, they could play a role. But they like all business, they have to evolve. If we go back 20 years ago, when he started talking about the evolution of the Internet, if you weren’t prepared to acquire your own domain name, nevermind, put up a website, you got forgotten about pretty quickly, you know, in the age of E commerce, if you weren’t prepared to go from moving things from the store shelves to now drop shipping them, you know, either directly or through someone like Amazon, you got forgotten about pretty quickly. So I think what the age we’re in now is that distribution has been tremendously valuable over the last 2530 years, and they’re going to need to evolve again, to be a continue to be part of that value chain. And, you know, with the likes of TD sinex, and Ingram, there’s a lot of smart people over there, I’m confident that they will evolve and continue to be part of value, whether they’re an orchestrator, whether they’re providing more regional support, you know, throughout different global markets. And there could be that still credit game, there’s still access to capital, that that they may play a part of, as well. So they’ll evolve and they’re not going away anytime soon.

Rob Spee  24:34

Yeah, and I think they are what I’m seeing we have a two tier distribution strategy beyond trust, and are leaning very heavily on the VADs. But more on from a customer success perspective, meaning the services element of it. And so they’re really stepping up and providing a scale both in partner service partner enablement and service partner certifications, but also actual service delivery, you know, either going out and doing the projects directly or being bench extensions to the park. partners. That’s the big, big role that they’re evolving to for us and marketplaces obviously can’t fulfill that. Maybe they’ll maybe that’s the role they’ll get into hyper scalars in the future. But today, that’s not their role.

Vince Menzione  25:10

Another role they might carry on behalf of the hyper scalars is the at least in the public sector space is owning some of the contract vehicles. Oh, yeah. So hyperscalers, in general, will not have a direct contract with the US Department of Defense or the state of Wisconsin or Yeah, local agencies, but aggregating that and being the transactional engine for that for the hyperscalers. It might be an interesting play for them as well.

Rob Spee  25:36

Yeah, I think so. You know, another big thing that’s happening at hyperscalers this year, and end of last year were layoffs fence, you know, a lot of big layoffs in those hyperscalers. What are you kind of hearing and seeing any any impact from that? Yeah, it’s

Vince Menzione  25:50

it’s a very interesting time, Rob, Microsoft laid off about 10,000 people, a lot of them came out of the partner side of the business, we did see, by the way, I think, inordinate number of people that were on the layoff side, were either in marketing or partnership related roles right across, I think, and I think that goes back to the old mindset of a CEO and a CRO that says, If I can’t touch it, and feel it, it ain’t so right with the channel, people are one one step removed from the customer in their mind. Yeah, I don’t believe to be true, by the way, what it’s what it means is that we all need to do more with less, the hyperscalers have, if you’re working with hyperscalers, you’re getting less support, you’re getting less people supporting you, you’re not gonna get that nurturing that you maybe thought you were gonna get before. And then within your own organization, you might have less resources as well. So you got to be smarter in your execution. I think you need to triage, you know, I look across some of my clients that I advise, maybe there’s relationships that they have, that maybe are not necessarily productive or bearing fruit. And maybe you need to look at your business a little harder and say, who are the 20% that are producing the 80% and lean in heavily there? That’s true for everybody. Today,

Paul Bird  26:59

I’ve seen the same thing, Rob, I’ve seen channel programs where they’ve either drastically reduced the headcount or cancelled it altogether, because it’s easier to attribute the sale to directly to from a direct seller to the end user. I think it’s a little bit short sighted because I think it limits their growth at scale. I think it limits their growth to a single vertical market. I don’t think it allows them to expand globally. But I think it’s a result of the the current market conditions. And at the same time, though, I’ve surprisingly, I’ve seen organizations that have decided, you know, these are the market conditions we’re in going entirely through channel, and we’re going to teach our direct level reps now to sell through channel. And that’s a transition. That’s a transition to go from a direct sales person now to a channel manager. I’m also seeing it happen in reverse as well. So it’s encouraging.

Rob Spee  27:54

Yeah, I don’t know if there’s any like Jamie McBain meter channel meter that measures the sentiment of pro channel cop versus, you know, con channel? Do you have a sense? Do you feel like it’s more pro today?

Paul Bird  28:05

I think from what I’ve seen, I’ve seen more people that are working on the direct side of things, only because of the the pullback I’ve seen from people that are going through channel. And I think that is because we’ve had this this tough economic time. And people are a lot of the investment firms are, will say a little reluctant to take risk and invest in new technology companies. I think as the economy rebounds in the coming months or the you know, into next year, and we see that investment back into the technology vertical, then I think we will also see the growth of channel programs partner ecosystems at the same time.

Rob Spee  28:45

Yeah, what I’m saying it’s interesting is, you know, it’s always hard at the beginning of the year, end of this year, whatever making targets, right? How much business are we going to do and how much through the channel and everything and we’re not growing as fast and as in terms of business through the traditional channel, as I as I had planned for, but where we’re growing faster is the business with the ecosystem. So you know, the engagement of our technology, alignments, lions, partners, the engagement of service delivery partners, engagement with the hyperscalers. That’s what’s growing at a much faster rate, and really boasting if you consider the total partner business,

Paul Bird  29:20

for sure. And I think one of the things we’re also seeing is because there is this kind of little bit of reduction in headcount within people managing the ecosystem, that the importance of automation, the importance of a enhanced personalized partner experience is really the way for you to grow your ecosystem with less people less headcount, managing it, you know, create that that experience of value, give people a reason to engage with your with your technology platform with your your marketplace listing. That really is what I think is going to do To help people separate themselves and make them a step ahead of their competitors, is creating that perfect partner experience, whether that’s in a PRM, or partner ecosystem management tool, whether it’s the direct engagement partner, because or partner experience now has to be a core focus of anyone that is growing their program through an ecosystem model.

Rob Spee  30:23

Yeah. And I think, Vince, you nailed it, people have to work smarter, right? And that’s leveraging the tools and technologies that you’re talking about, Paul, it’s not being complacent, we’ve got to be really, we’ve got to be a player. So we got to be on our game right, and do more with what we’ve got.

Vince Menzione  30:39

I still think we need to bring the east, the I’m sorry, we need to bring the C suite on board in a big way, was that I was at mentioned earlier, I was at the supernode event last week. And Bob Morris, the CEO of crossbeam, had a terrific presentation on ecosystem led growth and the importance of it. But he said emphatically that we’ve only brought around maybe six to 8% of organizations across the C suite, get ecosystem led growth. Yeah, you got to bring the rest of them on board. I don’t want to put you on the spot. Rob, obviously, you were you work within an organization where Yeah, systems important. What do you see from your side?

Rob Spee  31:12

Well, that has been my drumbeat since I got in the company. So I have made a really concerted effort. And that was my mandate, when I joined was to build this ecosystem. So I don’t think they knew exactly what that meant, and what it could do, but they knew it was the right path. So it’s been a journey. And we’ve all been working together to figure out what can it do for us, right? We’ve fact I was just presenting at our monthly company update with that we do in the company, and I got a chance to spend six minutes say, Hey, here’s where we at the story I gave was that okay? When I first joined, the mission was to build the ecosystem. Great news, we’ve done that now what we’re doing is what we call intelligent channeling. And that is orchestrating the ecosystem, and applying it in very smart ways of leveraging the different strengths of partners. So do we need one partner in the account 234, you know, whatever it takes to surround the customer with everything that they need to be successful throughout the buyers journey. And I’ve been preaching this and educating myself and educating the ELT and the C suite to keep them coming along board the journey. And now we’re at a phase of, okay, how do we start leveraging it for the innovation? That’s the next step. So intelligent channeling? And then innovation is is the next place to go? So I feel like we’ve made a lot of progress and do have good, you know, C suite understanding and collaboration. But it’s, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of dedicated effort to do that.

Vince Menzione  32:32

You’re looking at the client executive as that point of orchestration. Where do you see the orchestration happening?

Rob Spee  32:38

Boy, I don’t know if there’s any single point, you know, we talked about the distributor as the orchestrator, the channel account manager plays a big role on that, because each sales rep has a channel manager that they can go to, to help them say, Who do I need to do service delivery? Who do I need to do put this deal through who has contacts who has the service, or the security clearance, you know, that can go through there. So the cams play a really big role, but we’re trying to educate the reps to where they can do it themselves. And they want us to say, hey, every rep should have like, his own little team of sellers out in the channel. Right. Now, I think every rep should have their own little ecosystem. And understand who those players are kind of

Paul Bird  33:16

your go to people that get the job done. Big fan of that.

Rob Spee  33:19

Yeah. So I like turning the tables. Since you asked me a question. What are any other questions? For me?

Vince Menzione  33:23

I like to asking you a question. What are the biggest challenges you’re seeing as an chief ecosystem officer in a major ISP? Like, what are the things that are keeping you up at night?

Rob Spee  33:33

You know, I get asked that a lot. And I think, certainly change management is tough, right? And we talked about that educating the sellers, educating and even our channel team and getting them up to speed on this new motion, the whole motion of the ecosystem. So I think change management is number one, that’s the second biggest one. And sometimes it’s even the highest one is just getting systems to be to catch up with the rate of change, right? We’re driving change and transformation faster than our systems can keep up. Because how do you track all of this? How do you track influence? How do you attract six partners in a deal? How do you track and compensate people? It’s not easy. So there, I think you touched on this too, Paul, you know, systems weren’t set up to do this. So it’s, it’s, that’s a big, big challenge.

Paul Bird  34:16

And I think it’s also how do you preserve the mindshare? There is with so many different players inside of a single deal. Everyone has to be looking in the same direction. So how do you preserve that mindshare, and a lot of it is about enablement, empowering people. I was actually talking to somebody in an event last week that has created these kinds of short, two minute like episodes, like you would see on Netflix, that really tell a story about a brand about an effort and using that kind of micro learning, but through really engaging episode content in order to drive behavior now, the focus he was working on was really about employee retention. And at that point, they had reduced to employee churn, I believe by 18%. But, you know, employee retention partner onboarding, partner retention is all the same mechanism. So, you know, being able to create, I thought it was a great idea having kind of a very well engineered content that partners can create, or that brands can create for their partners. Does that keep everyone looking in the same direction? So we can maintain mindshare? Yeah,

Rob Spee  35:26

well, and maybe that’s what we need to do. We’ve all chatted about doing these more often and having more conversations and we get maybe we’ve gotten maybe you’re hinting that we’re getting long winded here. But we could do more shorter conversations to and just hit on other topics. So that could be fun. idea. I like events. Yeah, yeah. Well, our listeners might like it, too. But I love the long format, too. So it’s fun to have more deeper, deeper conversations. All right. So starting to wrap this up. I’m planning to launch this on the first day of summer, we’ll see if we if we are successful. Let’s talk about summer plans just for fun. Vince, what do you got planned for the summer?

Vince Menzione  36:01

Well, as you know, I’m launching a new product. So that going on Yeah, so but after that’s done after July happens, we’re heading up north to do a little visit up to the Merrill, actually at the Delaware shore and potentially New Jersey Shore, go visit the old stomping grounds. And I’ve got other partner conferences coming up. I might be showing up at a few other events this this late summer. So we’ll see. Very nice, very nice. How

Rob Spee  36:27

about you, Paul?

Paul Bird  36:28

Well, I’ve recently become a new grandfather. And we’ll be doing that again later on this year.

Vince Menzione  36:34

Congratulations. Congratulations. Fantastic.

Paul Bird  36:37

Thank you so much. So we have decided not to relocate to to Costa Rica, which was the first intention on my last channel journeys episode A little while ago,

Rob Spee  36:47

my condolences.

Paul Bird  36:50

Well, we actually moved to a beautiful town, we bought a nice old house, and I really want to restore it to its original glory, it’s already in great shape. But there are some areas that I would like to focus on. So I’m going to be spending a lot of time with the grandson and putting in some elbow grease to polish up the house. And that’s gonna be my summer,

Rob Spee  37:11

do they still have that series? This old house?

Paul Bird  37:13

I believe they do, I have actually watched some of the episodes. And again, the house is in great condition. Just some of the things on the outside, you can see that there’s, you know, six or seven layers of paint. And I want to bring that back to its its original glory. So that’s how I’m going to be spending my my time off this summer.

Rob Spee  37:31

That’s a really fun project. I love that kind of stuff. Because it’s tangible, right, you see immediately the results of your labor, unlike our business where you kind of wait and see what’s the impact.

Paul Bird  37:40

And we’re trying to forecast it for the quarter. And I’m trying to get this done in a weekend.

Rob Spee  37:45

Yes, that’s right. That’s right. That’s fantastic. I got a couple of fun things planned. We were working last night to lock in ceiling some plans for a European vacation at the end of the summer. So we’re gonna do a little bit of a driving tour, which we we’ve never really done. So that’ll be fun. Plus, I’ve got my big bike ride ride ride the ride across Iowa coming up end of July. So I heard that’s amazing. I’ve heard about that. It is amazing. And this is the 50th anniversary. So they’re expecting 50,000 people. That’s a big bike ride.

Paul Bird  38:15

That’s a big bike ride. And the road trips are one of my favorite thing I’ve done highway one from Portland, all the way to the border. I’ve done Canada, from where I am in Ontario all the way out to to the Pacific coast and back. And, you know, those those driving trips, I haven’t done it through Europe, but I’ve done it through Canada in the US and one of my favorite things to do. Where Yeah, sure. I’m sorry,

Rob Spee  38:39

we’re gonna fly into Amsterdam. So my wife and I, we both have Dutch heritage. So we’re going to visit family there. And then we’re going to drive down kind of the French German border. And we’ve got a couple of first we’re going to do with Newtown every night and try to see it all and they said, wait a sec, that’s too hectic. Let’s just pick like three towns and spend more time in each one of them. So we’ve got a town on the way down to town in the opposite we’re gonna spend time in and then another town on the way back. So that’s it. We’re mapping out where to stay and get an Airbnb and that type of thing. So yeah, it’s gonna be fun.

Paul Bird  39:08

That sounds like an adventure.

Rob Spee  39:10

It will be it will be alright guys, thank you so much. This was a fun conversation, as always on hyperscalers and ecosystems. Can’t wait to have another chat later.

Paul Bird  39:20

Great working with both you.

Vince Menzione  39:21

Thank you so much for having us, Rob. Appreciate

Rob Spee  39:25

My pleasure. See you guys. Take care.

Announcer  40:21

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner we’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering