Toronto firm’s growing partnership with Google ‘on a 10x rocket ship’ thanks to deep Anthos ties

For the first time, Google Cloud invited partners to its Accelerate sales kickoff conference in Las Vegas last month, an event that has historically been dedicated to the company’s employees.

Kyle Bassett, partner at Toronto-based services-led solution provider Arctiq, managed to get some stage time at the event to talk about how to take full advantage of Google Cloud’s offerings.

Arctiq, a rapidly-growing consulting partner with deep ties to software powerhouses like AWS, Red Hat, and Azure, has formed a special relationship with Google Cloud over the past two years. It’s been a worthwhile investment in many ways, indicated Bassett.

“The Google partnership is only growing, it’s been on a 10x rocket ship,” he told Channel Daily News. “And that mostly comes from us getting involved as a design partner for their Anthos product. We’ve been working with [Google’s] engineering team and product management team to help shape the product. It’s something we still do today. We get involved in every alpha release and work with their teams to get it to a point where it’s ready for general availability for customers. It’s been a year-and-a-half investment. Globally, we’re one of their few go-to partners for Anthos.”

Officially announced last year, Anthos is Google Cloud’s open hybrid and multi-cloud application platform. It’s compatible across platforms, so users can manage hybrid cloud deployments in Azure and AWS, along with Google Cloud.

Kyle Bassett on stage with Google developers showing of Anthos’ capabilities. Source: Twitter

 

Anthos is marketed as a solution stack rather than a single product, and it includes services for container orchestration, service management, and configuration and policy management.

A recent Forrester study commissioned by Google – so take the data with a grain of salt – says a large global enterprise with 15,000 employees and a revenue of $5 billion will become much more efficient across the board in the next three years.

The projected quantified benefits are $15.3 million to $42.8 million over three years for the composite organization. It also projects an ROI increase from 109 per cent to 484 per cent.

Forrester also found that the average customer is able to reduce developer non-coding time by 23 per cent to 38 per cent. And in one particular case, a financial services customer using Anthos found it was able to speed up application updates by 13 times.

Also:

Container space is crowded, but Red Hat is ‘very optimistic’ heading into 2020, says exec

 

Bassett said he and his team contributed to the Forrester study, and that while Anthos is still in its infancy, Google deserves a lot of “street cred” for its close work with partners in the field.

In addition, building a solution that doesn’t lock customers in is a bonus.

“They’re not shipping something and saying you have to buy my hardware to run our platform. They’re saying you can use your existing hardware and existing virtualization platform,” he said. “They’re meeting customers where they are and giving them choice. Anthos has turned into a whole service portfolio while leaning heavily into open source.”

New partner program

This week, Google Cloud also announced a new qualification for partner storage solutions: Anthos Ready Storage.

“This qualification recognizes partner solutions that have met a core set of requirements to run optimally with Anthos running on-premise and helps organizations select storage solutions that are deployed with Anthos,” Rayn Veerubhotla, director, partnerships and Manu Batra, product manager for Google Cloud said in a statement.

The first set of partners to achieve the Anthos Ready Storage qualification for Anthos on-premise are Dell EMC, HP Enterprise, NetApp, Portworx, Pure Storage, and Robin.io.

All Anthos Ready Storage partners have met multiple criteria, says Google Cloud, including:

  • Demonstrated core Kubernetes functionality including dynamic provisioning of volumes via open and portable Kubernetes-native storage APIs.
  • A proven ability to automatically manage storage across cluster scale-up and scale-down scenarios.
  • A simplified deployment experience following Kubernetes practices.

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Alex Coop
Alex Coophttp://www.itwc.ca
Former Editorial Director for IT World Canada and its sister publications.

Related Tech News

Featured Tech Jobs

 

CDN in your inbox

CDN delivers a critical analysis of the competitive landscape detailing both the challenges and opportunities facing solution providers. CDN's email newsletter details the most important news and commentary from the channel.