Google’s Partner Engineering Head Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

Google Cloud is approaching a $30B business, and its partners have witnessed remarkable success in driving bold digital transformation journeys for customers. In this Ultimate Guide to Partnering episode, Clive D’Souza takes us through the role and mission of Google Cloud’s Partner Engineering organization, explains how his team supports customers and partners on their transformational journey and how partners can best engage with his organization to drive win-win-win outcomes through precision partnering. I enjoyed this insightful conversation, especially our deep dive into ethical AI and the use of AI for Good! Tune in to learn how Google Cloud’s Partner Engineering drives the use of AI for good!

In Clive’s words

Clive D’Souza is a technology leader with over 20 years of industry experience. Clive is an engineer by trade, a general manager by choice, with a passion for solving customer problems. He has held senior leadership positions at several companies, including Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Intel Corporation, and Honeywell Flight Control Systems. 

In his current role as the Head of Partner Engineering at Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Clive leads a team of engineers who work with Google’s partner ecosystem to help businesses build, deploy, manage, and migrate their applications on GCP. Partner Engineering focuses on bringing to market some of the most advanced and cutting-edge technologies from GCP and third-party software providers.

What You’ll Learn

• The mission of partner engineering.3:27
  
  • Partner engineering focuses on technology enabling and delivery excellence.
    
  • Partner ecosystem. Mission and mission.
    
  • How to organize a Google team for success.
    
  • Partner-led organization. Partner-first
    
  
  
• Organize by the partner and skill up.6:40
  
  • One plus one equals one, solving for the customer first.
    
  • Google is highly differentiated.
    
  
  
• How do you look for expertise in partners?9:44
  
  • The entire cloud ecosystem is moving and maturing.
    
  • RAMP, rapid migration program.
    
  • Why Google Cloud partners should choose to work with them.
    
  • What makes a good partner?
    
  
  
• Clive’s definition of a successful partner.15:02
  
  • Clive shares what he looks for in a successful partnershipas.
    
  • The customer has to be the 360 for a successful partnership.
    
  
  
• Transitioning to the cloud.18:24
  
  • Peeling away old apps and refactoring legacy applications.
    
  • An ongoing journey of transformation.
    
  • Steps to follow during a migration.
    
  • Migration wave one, wave two and wave three.
    
  
  
• How is google cloud approaching the generative Ai arms race?21:46
  
  • How Google Cloud is approaching the AI arms race.
    
  • Google’s approach to AI.
    
  • Good use of technology in the medical field.
    
  • Why partners should choose Google Cloud.
    
  
  
• What is the ideal partner for technical enablement?27:29
  
  • What Google looks for in a partner.
    
  • The three spectrums of partners.
    
  • Partner-led company, partner-led companies and end-scale for Google.
    
  • Three factors to focus on in a learning organization.
    
  
  
• Pivoting from construction to computer science.31:09
  
  • The career journey Clive went through.
    
  • The pivot point that got him to this point.
    
  • Pivoting from construction to arizona state.
    
  • Mentors and mentors in his journey.
    
  
  
• Who would you invite to your dinner party?34:27
  
  • Introducing Clive to the dinner party.
    
  • Introducing general patton and mark cuban.
    
  • Lowering healthcare costs in the us.
    
  • Advice for B2B and B2C partners.
    
  
  

Exclusively Sponsored By Google Cloud

This episode of the podcast is exclusively sponsored by Google Cloud. Google Cloud’s mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to transform its business digitally. More than any other top cloud provider, Google Cloud as unique capabilities to meet customers’ needs across four areas. Data, Trust, Open Infrastructure, and Collaboration are all underpinned by Sustainable Technology. Learn more at cloud.google.com

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, The 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.

Other Noteworthy Episodes Featuring Google Cloud

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/182-how-google-cloud-is-helping-isv-partners-drive-customer-success/

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/181-how-google-clouds-channel-partner-leader-drives-success-with-precision-partnering/

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/180-what-makes-a-great-services-partner-google-clouds-leader-decodes-it/

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/179-precision-partnering-with-google-cloud-unlocking-a-30-billion-opportunity-for-tech-leaders/

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/159-google-transforms-the-future-of-healthcare-and-what-it-means-to-you/

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/146-a-top-google-sales-leader-investing-in-partners-to-fuel-hyper-growth/

https://theultimatepartner.com/episode/140-one-google-executive-applies-10x-mindset-to-improve-healthcare-outcomes/

Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partners, customers, cloud, work, google, organization, ultimate guide, migration, good, ai, technology, clive, workload, analogy, google cloud, lead, ecosystem, world, enable, love

SPEAKERS

Clive D’Souza, Vince Menzione, Announcer

Vince Menzione  00:00

with their latest financial results, Google Cloud is approaching a $30 billion business and ranks Google as the third largest of the leading cloud providers, or hyper scalars. This creates a massive opportunity for partners to help Google’s customers take full advantage of their cloud environments by providing the additional services platforms that expertise only partners can provide. And if you’re a technology leader, looking to learn how to effectively grow your business, then you’re not going to want to miss this exclusive Ultimate Guide to partnering series, precision partnering, where I’m joined by the Google leaders driving the partnership business to help define what it takes to effectively partner with Google.

Announcer  00:52

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  01:11

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and today I will Clive D’Souza is the head of partner engineering for Google Cloud North America, and he joins this special series of the podcast precision partnering a masterclass partnering with Google Cloud, Clive and I have a thought provoking and insightful conversation on how his team applies deep technical expertise, and partner engineering to enable and support partners that are taking customers on their transformational journey. We also discussed what attributes he sees his key to working with his organization, and the unique path from humble roots to computer science that he took. You’ll also learn how he’s applying Google clouds precision partnering methodology to create a win win win for partners like you, and how you and your organization can best engage to drive mutually successful outcomes. Partnering with Google, I hope you enjoy and learn from this insightful and thought provoking discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Clive D’Souza. This episode of the podcast is exclusively sponsored by Google Cloud. Google clouds mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business more than any other top cloud provider Google Cloud as unique capabilities to meet the needs of customers across four areas Data Trust, open infrastructure and collaboration, all underpinned by sustainable technology, learn more@cloud.google.com. Clive, welcome to the podcast.

Clive D’Souza  03:05

Thank you for having us. I’m looking forward to a chat today.

Vince Menzione  03:08

I am so excited to welcome you here on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You’re the head of partner engineering at Google Cloud North America. So for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit more about your role partner engineering at Google Cloud, North America, and your organization and its mission?

Clive D’Souza  03:27

Absolutely. Let me start with the mission. And then we’ll work our way down in terms of what my team’s charter and roles and responsibilities are purely from a mission perspective. Partner engineering focuses on the technical enabling and delivery excellence for the entire park ecosystem to drive customer excellence and the best customer outcomes. We start and end with the customer. People always talk about working backwards, we have a 360 view of the customer. And that also includes the partner ecosystem. So that’s our mission. That’s the ethos we live by, as it relates to how our team is spread and structured. So I have the entire spectrum of partners. This includes large global systems integrators, the big guys like the Accenture, the Lloyds, the TCS, Natsios the world, we have the resellers of the world, you can think of the sedan, the quantifiers, and six degrees, and C W’s. And then you have the ISV ecosystem. These are the ones which deploy third party applications, either directly on Google as a SaaS offering, and then they bring customers along with or they can transact through a Google marketplace, and then deploy into the customers and why. And then I have a fourth pillar, which essentially goes very deep. These are the subject matter experts, you can think of them as level four or 500. Architects who specialize and they are very intent based architects who can help connect anything from a third party is we offering to something which is a primitive inside Google’s cloud services, or work with a customer or a partner to solve a very gnarly migration problem, right? It could be something like doing a migration of our mainframe to that effect. So my team struggles, essentially at a high level, all the the entire POC ecosystem deep inside the Google infrastructure space,

Vince Menzione  05:09

I find that fascinating because you’re going across very different work streams, I would say, right, from a GSI perspective to a reseller to an ISV. That’s built a product offering. And then this deep architecture component, how do you organize that team for success?

Clive D’Souza  05:26

It all starts with what we are trying to accomplish with the customers. And our founding ethos is when customers move their workloads either to the cloud, through migration, or for that matter, they are doing a cloud native deployment. It’s a function of what skill sets are needed. Like in the case of my team, we have expertise all the way from Janay. I’m sure we’ll talk about that later. And something as germane as setting up what the right storage architecture would be for you from a disaster recovery from a latency and how you do spread across gos. So the long winded answer is that the short run that is what is the specific customer workload we’re trying to go after to help. And that’s how we can position our engineers to work with that. That being said, we are well aware that the entire ecosystem, enabling as it relates to moving the workflow to the cloud, is partner ecosystem, you know, we are fairly and squarely 100 person, partner led entity and organization, we believe in partner first. So most of my organization, the principal engineers, with the partner engineers, are actually attached to specific partners, and you work with them, to enable their teams to enable their work streams to enable their workshops to drive the deployment models with the customers and customers for Google. So that’s how we spread out. So pretty much the entire spectrum is covered that

Vince Menzione  06:43

I think what I hear here, too, which is, you know, I think this is a great point is that you organize by partner, but then you also think customer, and Jim talks about this one plus one equals one, which is we come together to solve for the customer. And that may require several partners, right, but you’re thinking about the customer first in the equation, and then you’re also helping these organizations to skill up, because I know that it is a hybrid cloud world or a multi cloud world and organizations may be come at it from different angles, right? Is that a true statement?

Clive D’Souza  07:16

That is actually you stated this beautifully. That’s 100% accurate statement. And there are multiple facets into that. When you bring a partner in to a workload migration, and to your point, that workload has got a very specific skill set need, what you need for infrastructure migration is very different than an app modernization or for that matter, very different than what you need for something for enabling security or security posture. And then the AI is a different beast altogether. Oftentimes, specially in the case of really large customers, and in some cases, even the mid market customers, they will have more than one partner involved, depending upon the speciality. But what does not change for the partner. And for the end customer is the underlying platform, which is Google Cloud. So when my team gets involved, we look at holistically across the entire spectrum. We look at are they following the best practices? Are they do they have the access to all those artifacts in need? Are we set up the right governance model around? And do we have the right set of technologies being used not just by one partner, but all across partners? For the right outcome for the customer? Right, that’s where we we start, that’s where we add. And then the thing which we always always mentioned in our team, and we keep it front and center, it’s not just the technology, which matters to us. It’s what happens when the partners move on. And the customers have to manage that the entire environment, right? That skill up has to happen. And the customers have to be self sustaining. And they have to get to a point that they start growing. So that’s how we look at it. So basically, we look at it from a long point of view. And we always ensure that customers are kept home, not just for the experience, but also from the fact that when they’re running their artifact their workflows in the Cloud, it runs absolutely like clockwork, like an engine, which is very well oiled.

Vince Menzione  09:03

What strikes me, because of my own experiences and knowledge of Google, and working with organizations that are Google partners, that Google is highly differentiated from an engineering perspective, and a lot of the work that you do is transformative for these organizations. And I think about almost like a fine tuned race car, as opposed to maybe a Ford Maverick or some other vehicle. And that the work that needs to get done is a little bit more specialized and may require a little bit more, especially these organizations that are newer, that are trying to get on board and become successful partners working with you in the organization. They need these additional skills and capabilities coming from your team. And that’s a great

Clive D’Souza  09:44

analogy. One of the things and I’ve been in the hyper scalar business for I would say over a decade now, I’ve been in industry for 25 years, and every platform has gotten nuances, but in the grand scheme of things, the way you put it, it’s very elegant. The entire cloud ecosystem is moving And it’s maturing, the processes are maturing. And as we look at the partner ecosystem today, and we look at the customers, the entry point for the customers today has significantly more when they’re moving a specific workload to the cloud 1520 years ago, and it was still the gen one cloud. And I would argue, there’s a significant amount of workload sitting in a legacy cloud more than one, right and that the cloud is moving so fast. So to your point, when you bring in multiple partners, you bring in multiple technologies together, it has been clockwork, you don’t want to knocking in your engine. And to use the analogy, and you want to make sure that you have the right distributor setup for the timing of the cylinders to fire, especially if you’re extending that analogy, or multiple partners, and you’re running a migration. As an example. When we lead migrations, and we enable customers, we go to something called ramp, we just announced it actually recently, it’s a rapid migration program. It’s a world class program. And it’s not just technologies, right? Just like a race car. It’s not just about the engine. But it’s also the expertise, the foreman, the crew, the pit crew, and how you’re putting the entire system together. It’s the wheels, it’s the chassis isn’t everything. And the same construct, we extend that when we look at RAM, you have stakeholder alignment, you want to ensure that the best policies for cloud governance, which we have learned over many cycles with deep scars and a bar to bring it in. And we believe that every migration, and truly from a Google Cloud perspective, you know, constantly iterate. And the other thing, which I always remind people, when you look at the very large, distributed deployment of Google today, we are in the cloud right before the cloud really was okay, let’s be transparent about it, right. And you’ve already been on the world, your google.com, or Gmail, or Google Docs used to work even before it became cloud. So now we’re bringing that expertise, which is very secure, very well managed, highly distributed, highly resilient to this space. So that is where we differentiate. And that is the same ethos. And that’s a level of expertise. And that’s the level of thinking we bring in when we talk about distributed systems. In the race car analogy.

Vince Menzione  12:07

It’s such a great analogy. As we were working with these organizations, and our listeners come from this ecosystem world, right. Some of them grew up in the Microsoft world, some of them in AWS, others from other disciplines and platforms, what do you look for in partners and from from their lens? Why should partners choose or decide to work with Google Cloud?

Clive D’Souza  12:30

That’s two part question. So sure, there are other clouds, you we totally acknowledge that we embrace competition, and it is good for the entire ecosystem. As it relates to what we do. Specifically, we’re partners in as Jim mentioned in his podcast earlier, in addition to the standard market development funds, very specific funding and expertise, which is given to partners. Our ethos as a company is we are a partner organization, what that means for us is not just doing stuff with partners, in terms of all the go to market activities, it’s also in a very thoughtful and deliberate manner. Like, for me, it’s my team is small, it’s a few hundreds at most, we are never going to go and compete with the partners in the ecosystem. While we have a professional services organization, that’s very hard firewall, we don’t have any data, transferring it one way or the other. So that’s how you work with the partners from an ecosystem perspective. As to what makes a good partner and how we envision them. Our definition of a good partner is anyone who leans in weathers doing the right thing for the customers on Google technologies. It’s a wide spectrum, we have an extremely high touch white glove engineering team, which goes in very deep partners and brings them a very rapidly up to skill set, through immersion days through boot camps and actual live workshops, where we can take them to the entire journey at no cost to the partner and get them to a point they can very rapidly start moving workloads. In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to take a partner through entire journey over a matter of weeks, right three to four weeks, and they start the first migrations, that’s how rapidly we bring. And it’s a no holds barred. It’s an open dialogue. And we do it in such a manner that every single artifact we create is based on open standards and open sourcing. So we do not believe in holding a door tied to a chest right. So we actually constantly are pushing it out and growing the ecosystem.

Vince Menzione  14:19

I love what you have to say here because I do think that you’re providing a tremendous amount of enablement, training support along the way. And the fact that Thomas Kurian has put that stake in the ground and said we want every opportunity every customer to be working with partners is just it means that you’re not competing, you’re working side by side with these organizations.

Clive D’Souza  14:41

If I may follow up paying champion conflict matters a lot for us, right and we have seen it. We have loved it. I’ve been a part of the whole experience and when it comes to that we are very sensitive and to Thomas’s point and to Jim’s point, we take that very seriously here. So we will work to the ecosystem. We will scale to the ecosystem, we will even grow the ecosystem. That’s just a founding principle.

Vince Menzione  15:03

I love what you have to say here. And this is the ultimate guide to partnering. And this series is precision partnering. So Clive, what do you look for? What do you believe to be true for successful Partnering

Clive D’Souza  15:15

for a successful partner, it goes back to what we always say, the customer has to be the 360. For us, it’s not just getting a partner who can have the best quiver of technology arrows in them. It’s also about the end customer quality outputs, we care for all things like the delivery Readiness Index, things like the partner delivery quality, things like the partner Excellence Framework, these are things we keep a very close watch on. As an example. It’s not about a partner, having the best trained Google engineers, the best train infrastructure security networking storage specialist, it’s also about ensuring that specific workload was delivered in a timely manner and the most secure manner. And now when you put in Gen AI, the highest standard of ethics for the customer. So it’s for us, that’s where it begins and ends, right. So we look at partners as part of the entire machinery, it’s a cloud. And as long as the partners can commit to that, and we can, we will work with them, to your point earlier about enabling them and getting them in expertise. That’s what we look for partners, right. And we do not really differentiate or distinguish as a small partner, or RSI versus a GSI, or MSP to have different standards. This is what it’s expected from everyone, every one of them has got a point as a CSAT score, if you will, which the customers give to us. And we watch that very activity, right. So it’s, it’s not just one data point, I wish I could tell you what we look for an ideal partner. It’s multiple data points. And these are constantly viewed and graded. And then we work with a partner to fill the gaps we are seeing, we learn from the partner where we have to go and harden our systems. At the end of the day, the customer satisfaction is what drives us.

Vince Menzione  17:07

It strikes me Jim talked about one of the challenges being here, too, right? It’s easy to go in and do that first workload or maybe transact the workload. And what I’m hearing from your discussion here is this is transformative work, it is not a one and done. And your organization is helping the partner nurture the customer and bring them along on the journey is that a good analogy?

Clive D’Souza  17:33

It is and in the best proverbial is we just don’t have a fish for that we teach them and a lot of the partners without taking any names, because I’m sure I’ll say a few. And I’ll forget more essentially goes down to working with the customers creating a cloud Center of Excellence. And that is just not technology. It’s also the governance models behind it. It’s also how you’re going to actually go and get the next generation technologies with a cloud first cloud centric, digital native construct, and drive the digital transformation in a continuum. Because when you look at migrations, these are not in point in time. As you mentioned earlier, it’s not about just moving one workload from the on prem or a shared or hybrid data center to the cloud and everybody goes home. Unfortunately, that’s just the starting pistol fire going off for a long race, what tends to happen is those workloads have to then get optimized, you have to right size them. Oftentimes, you have to peel away apps, which you no longer use them are not they’re not built sort of the cloud, and you have to replace them and refactor them. So these are things more often than not once a customer gets that expertise in the cloud. And they get their DevOps savvy and they understand the constructs of, here’s how I do my microservices, here’s how I do our distributed architecture looks like it’s an ongoing journey, right? So it’s a relationship which will maintain through partners or directly with customers. But that will be something which will be an ongoing journey. It’s not a one and done. It never is

Vince Menzione  18:58

now and as you’re describing this, to me, reminds me of Gomes, think about renovating a house, right. It’s you don’t just do one room, and then you’re done. It’s an ongoing journey. Right? You talk about old applications, legacy applications, as customers see the fruit of the transformation, they look at more areas of focus and how they can continue to transform. I think

Clive D’Souza  19:21

that’s a great analogy. I only think in that analogy if we had a good contractor, right? We will deliver on time, we will not do cost overruns. Right.

Vince Menzione  19:32

The partners of the contractor. Yeah, we have the oversight, your own depot, you’re providing all the tools and platforms and capabilities to get there.

Clive D’Souza  19:42

Right. So we make we create enough condition then we create enough opportunities for the partners to deliver on time at the highest quality and all of that. It’s a good way to look at it. And again this kind of goes back to the early analogy right. Every time there is a migration there are certain steps which have To be followed, irrespective of how large or how small or how early in the game you are, you have to establish a landing zone, you have to establish your security posture, you have to establish a governance and enforcement mechanisms. That being said, we also know that with every new workload, net new workload, you have different dependency mappings, you have other applications, which you need to move to the cloud. And I always keep reminding people that people do not migrate infrastructure, they might add apps. And once those applications start moving, you get the dependencies, you get the mapping, and you understand what can and should we move to the cloud and what needs to be left behind each of these workloads to your analogy earlier, could be looked as a room, and we call them waves and migration wave one wave to wave three. And there is a very stubborn mechanism we put together so that this whole wave one wave to wave three comes together, the analogy is wave one has to talk to wave two, maybe in the housing example would be like your plumbing wherever you write your electricity wherever, right because room one has to still functioning on the room two, so on and so forth, the foundation cannot be mismatched and all of that, right. So yes, it is a contracting mechanism. But we also view literally, within the scope of a cloud that you should learn from the mistakes you’re making in room one and not repeat them in room two. And room one should have the learnings of all the experience of your last 25 homes. So we need to get that straight to the customer to the partner right either to my team or the partner has done enough of these Google our for that matter in cloud, and they get the value intrinsic value delivered to the customer. That’s how we view it right. None of these should be net new activity. Let’s figure it out. That’s not I would not put a bunch of high school kids to build a home. Let me put it that

Vince Menzione  21:43

Yes, exactly. Great analogy there. Clive. This has been an interesting six months, right. This whole AI generative AI conversation has erupted I think is probably the best term right. Unless chat GBT open AI and the like Google has been leading the forefront of AI since the very early days of surge. How is Google Cloud approaching this AI arms race?

Clive D’Souza  22:11

The reason I’m pausing on this one. So when we look at AI, when we look at Gen AI in general, we are taking that job that whole new moment extremely seriously. So our response is no different than how Thomas and sunder have super articulated well, it is it’s very controlled. It’s very deliberate. And it’s very methodical. As much as we believe in the value of Gen AI. We are also well aware of the downside of misusing the technology. And one of the reasons Google is taking the approach we are where we are coming to market, they shouldn’t be surprised. But we are coming to market in a very well thought out manner. And that the thing which I always remind customers and partners, when we have these conversations that Google to your point earlier has been at the forefront of all things AI, we released transform in 2017. We have over 3000 scholars working full time. And we have over 7000 articles, which all trace back to the advancements we are made in the construct of an AI and ML. So our approach is going to be very well thought out. Our partners are getting trained as we speak to deploy solutions, not just for Google, but also with customers. But we are taking the step you will want further every use case has to go to an ethics committee, we work with them, we set the standards and you scale this to the partners to set that baseline expectation that this is what we are expecting. So our approach is grounded on the reality that what we introduced to the market is very profound. But we were snapped back to our company Google’s ethos, right? We take the responsibility of managing and sorting and maintaining the security of the data, global data bases, and Geney is going to be no different. We just acknowledge that the potential for negative user technology is extremely high. And that’s why we are putting the guardrails around it this is not about speed. And getting fast. This is about going further. That’s where we are looking at the technology.

Vince Menzione  24:12

Yeah, it strikes me, you know, he started thinking about ethical AI, right? There’s so much good, that can happen. But there’s also so much bad that can happen and just being an ethical organization with your approach is what strikes me here it is.

Clive D’Souza  24:25

And when double clicking on a large language model with the world started looking at pattern recognition, using regression, then they had some sort of a neural networks coming in where they could look at essentially gobs of data, not as unstructured as what language models can. And they could come up with a pattern. Now with large language models. You can look at 10s and hundreds of petabytes of data completely unstructured and you can create patterns. So the value it brings the good value, things like you and the medical field you have access to unbelievable amounts of data as a physician, you can get the time to value which could be a diagnostics, or it could be getting the next generation of drugs or it can be the next procedure, very fast, good use of technology. If you are a research lab, and you have access to the world’s library, and you want to get to a specific thesis or right up, you want to do a bunch of papers, good use of technology, if you are on the commercial side of the house, and you want to go and have a great customer experience, in a customer support call, right? You have a real time, chat bot, getting them out the questions coming in from a user which they no longer have to be a query, they can be something they type into the chat box. And that translates into something which the Chatbot can understand as something, when is the next sale for kids clothes on something? And you get a very rapid answer, good use of technology, we want to have that experience, we want to drive those experiences. And that’s where we are enabling acknowledge, there are many examples of the bad side of the technology. I don’t want to go there. And I always I’m a firm believer, you find what you go looking for. I’m gonna focus on the positive. Right. So that’s where I had is, and you want to do this, in a way, and we firmly believe it can be done. Is there a risk? Yes, it can be done. But that’s what we are focusing using Jenai. For the good.

Vince Menzione  26:21

I love this such a thoughtful conversation, it reminded me of a conversation I had with Chris sokoloski, who has been a guest here on the podcast about your healthcare business. He’s amazing human. I’ve known Chris for many years now. And just the notion of the access to all of the clinical trials and all the outcomes and histories and all the great work that will come out of that the future looks so bright. On the positive side,

Clive D’Souza  26:45

it does, indeed, taking the analogy of the clinical trials in the data. We all know all things HIPAA slash healthcare data, the level of sensitivity on that on the level of privacy on that when we use Gen AI in that construct, we are well aware of that and those controls are built in. And that kind of goes back to the point I made earlier about having ethical AI standards and policies. That is why the reason when you ask me a level of behind, yes, we are. But we acknowledge it that we have to build the systems around it, as opposed to picking up the outcome of a poorly planned product.

Vince Menzione  27:20

I want to flip a question I asked you earlier, I asked you about why partners should choose working with you and Google Cloud. But what is the ideal partner? What is the best partner? From your perspective, when it comes to technical enablement? What do you look for from those partners,

Clive D’Souza  27:38

there are three spectrums we look at partners. One is the number one never gonna change. Having that customer empathy, customer first attitude, we totally get it. Partners are here for a commercial element of the house, we but we always say customers have to come first. And that needs to come from the partners to, in many ways partners an extension of Google, right. That’s how we look at it. So that’s one. The second thing which we always look at is purely from once we have the customer equation taken care of, it’s not just a technical depth to the partner at one point in time, it has to be a learning organization at the speed which we are moving in cloud, as the world has seen. We need to have a partner who’s equally vested not in just delivering outstanding and world class solutions for the customers, but also constantly sharpening the Saunder. So we need a partner who’s constantly innovating with us constantly pushing on new, diverse use cases, new adoptions, technology and pushing back. And that’s the third one, where it’s a very tight coupling. It’s not just using products from Google, it’s also coming back and saying here as a five things or five features or two products. So where we should go and influence roadmap with you. And that becomes a very synergistic very symbiotic relationship. Those are partners, who truly, if you look at it are a logical extension of this giant body. It’s that new line going up. That’s what we look for partners. And to be very fair, and to be very transparent. We have had a great run with partners and we expect this to go on pretty much across the board majority of partners treat us this way. I always tell everyone on them, Google will never have 1000s and 1000s of employees and partner organizations will always be the hundreds by design. If you look at Jim’s point of view, if you look at Adairs point of view, look at Thomas point of view, we are partner first we are partner led company and you know scale through power scale for Google will come through partners, it will not come through to three organizations sitting inside the power of it, but the tooling, the end scale is going to come through partners, that is where our partner ecosystem is.

Vince Menzione  29:40

So I love what you had to say here you talked about three factors or three characteristics I would say he talked about customer empathy, right relationship building, understanding the customer working with the customer, you talked about the learning organization, which I love that and that the organizations need to I use the term agility quite a bit. These organizations need to lean in, build new practices or listen for opportunities, where they can derive better outcomes, build practices, practice areas and skills to support their growth with and through you. And then the pushing back piece, which I think is about feedback, like having the candid, maybe aggressive, but in a diplomatic way, conversations with you and your organization, about feature sets about capabilities that they would like to see from the platform from the organization. Is that right?

Clive D’Souza  30:31

That is right. And, look, we’re not perfect, we totally get it. And we are very open to getting that input coming in. The other point, which I want to drive on the second aspect from a learning organization. We are a firm believer that if organizations don’t move on this is a fairly stereotypical, right, you regress to the mean very quick, especially at the pace cloud is moving. So the reason we emphasize that partners and even our own engineering teams are constantly pushing is because the customers are the end recipients of this technology without to be agile, they have to innovate with the bleeding edge, otherwise, they will regress to the mean. So it’s all tied through, right. So that’s how we look at it.

Vince Menzione  31:10

Some fantastic conversation, we could go on all day Clive here, I think you and I could sit in the room with a cup of coffee and just talk the whole day long about this, I’d love to do that at some point with you. But for our listeners, we’re going to need to pivot. And if you don’t mind, as you might know, from listening to other episodes, I’m fascinated with the career journey and how people got to this particular spot in their career. And you’ve had an amazing career, I think you mentioned, I think, 25 years, a long stint at Intel of fairly significant stint with or period of time with AWS, a competitor of Google, and then your time at Oracle, which all seem to lead to this role in many respects. But I’d love for you to share with us. Was there a pivot point? Was there an inflection that got you to this spot as a significant leader in your career?

Clive D’Souza  31:59

If there was one point in my career, and I don’t speak about this widely, very early in my career, I’m not a computer science major. My undergrad was in structures, right. And I always tell people, I have a learning disability and never do well, the test when there are multiple choice questions. For me, it’s got to be conceptual, and I can solve that. But I gravitated towards computers when I was very, very young, in my academic career. And for one reason, or the other didn’t make computer science. So for me, the pivot point was working in construction, and not giving up my goal to actually make a career in computer science. So I used to be in construction sites, building buildings. In fact, here’s a trivia, if you look at Infosys, when the largest construction software companies in the world today, there’s a place called Electronic city, I was a lead engineer for some of the buildings. And I would actually go help design that building, pump concrete and whatever, right. And then I would go and take computer science classes in the night, I did that for a year and a half. And then I got a full ride to Arizona State on a NASA scholarship, and never looked back. For me. That was my pivot point. And then I went on to do avionics code, I ran a health healthcare startup. I’ve done all things silicon. And then I made my way to the cloud.

Vince Menzione  33:15

Was there something like was there a spark thing or a mentor that made you make that decision to go from construction is and it’s fascinating that we were talking about construction as an analogy here earlier, that you actually learn the construction? Was there something that made you make that leap to Arizona State and to where you ultimately lead?

Clive D’Souza  33:35

I’ve had many mentors, right, a few come to mind. But if I were to go back, my girlfriend and my wife now who’s been 28 years, right, she was the one who said, Look, if you truly believe in it, you gotta risk it. And at the age of, I don’t know, 20 to 23. I’m a first generation immigrant. I have no connections in this country. Now, my brothers moved here and all that, but I left everything behind. And I’m a son of a soldier. So for it for me, it was like, I Let’s risk it. Worst case scenario, go back into yours. And here we are 25 years later. So that for me was the pivot and mentors and we can have a long conversation on that. I’m a firm believer of that. I’ve had some amazing managers were ended up becoming our mentors. But yes, that would be my biggest pivot point.

Vince Menzione  34:16

Clearly, you made some very good decisions, both listening to your then girlfriend and wife and then marrying her and being partners in your journey, I would say. So, really great. That’s a really great story. Clyde. Thank you for sharing.

Clive D’Souza  34:32

I’m fortunate. Thank you.

Vince Menzione  34:34

So this is my favorite question. And it’s one I love to ask all our guests. You are hosting a dinner party and you can host this amazing dinner party in anywhere in the world I’m we can pick a location, but for this dinner party, you can invite any three guests from the present or the past. I’ve even had a couple people say someone in the future whom would you invite Clive to this Raising dinner party and why?

Clive D’Souza  35:02

Oh, that’s a tough one. Okay. But the first part, I’ll solve it for you, that dinner party is going to mean go. And those of the listeners and if you don’t know what, let’s go as southwest, it’s a beautiful tropical beach place where my heart is. I spend most of my life in India there, it would be in one of the small shack restaurants we have specialized in local cuisine on the sand. So that’s where it would be three people, I would invite the following three, I’ve had the fortune of meeting one, assuming they all make it and we industry, the first remodel tracer, I actually met her as a very, very young kid for her altruism without any agenda. I saw her come in and take 10s of orphan children back in India and Assam when they were floods, and they lost their parents, and there was no agenda behind that. The second one will be General Patton. If you look at the Battle of the Bulge, he exemplifies, for me, execution eats strategy for breakfast any day anytime. He was a man of extreme leadership, and very few people realize what was at stake at the Battle of bulge. Then he led through it. It took a significant damage, but he took that threat. And the third one, well, I wish I could actually mean I respect him a lot based on everything I read about him is Mark Cuban aid. And he’s doing things as an entrepreneur. And I like to paraphrase or put him in a bucket where he using technology for good. If you look at what he’s doing with the whole generic medical medicine industry, and trying to actually lower the cost of medication. I’ve actually had a stint in healthcare. And I know the ins and outs of who makes the money the doctors don’t they make pennies on the dollar. It’s the insurance companies and middleman. And marks done a phenomenal job. At least you start with something. So those are three I would invite, it would be in goer, it would be in a beach shack, it would be there will be definitely with the local seafood cuisine. And the local beverages for sure. Both alcoholic

Vince Menzione  37:03

it sounds fabulous. Clive, I’m going to have to come to go. And first of all, I’ve never been there. I hear the beaches are beautiful. So I’m going to need the I love the locale with the beach shack, local cuisine right on the beach just sounds fascinating. And your guests like Mother Teresa. Wow. We could go on about Mother Teresa. General patent is that’s a first gen patent. My father was a soldier in World War Two, you didn’t know that. My, my father admired General Patton quite a bit. And then Mark Cuban. And I do feel that he is doing great work on generic medicines and generic drugs. And I would love to see that our costs lower there because I agree with you. We are all paying too much 90% of GDP is towards health care in this country. And it’s it’s an astounding number. And we’re not well as a country. So some really great answers there. Thank you. Clive, you had exceeded my expectations. As a guest today, I want you to know that you have been an amazing guest, you are so thoughtful, it is clear that you and your team are doing outstanding work. And for our listeners, is there any guidance you can give them on optimizing for their success working with you and your organization?

Clive D’Souza  38:19

Before we go to that, Vince, thank you. You’ve been an amazing host. And I am very thoughtful questions, very provocative questions. I appreciate you thinking of me for this podcast. Now for our guests, anyone and everyone out there baby partners, b2b customers, in the grand scheme of things, we always look at technology when we need look at Google. It’s not about being fast. It’s not about trying to come up with something shiny, it’s always coming up with a platform that scales it’s distributed is highly secure, and will always do good. And that includes not just with technology, doing the right thing with the partners, doing the right thing with our ecosystem, and definitely putting the customers right in the center. So when we will talk about our technology, our platform, our offering our ethos, that’s what we stand for. That’s what we landed on.

Vince Menzione  39:10

I don’t think I need to say anything else. I think you nailed it. Clive, I want to thank you so much. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for being so thoughtful today. And I hope our listeners listen to this again and again. So thank you for being an amazing guest on this precision partnering series working with Google Cloud. Thank you so much.

Clive D’Souza  39:32

Thank you again.

Vince Menzione  39:33

So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it. We all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of real Reasons why partnerships fail. And at ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft, and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com.

Announcer  40:24

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 partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering