Offering the most extensible and optimized AI stack with our partners

I’m thrilled to welcome more than 2,500 of our partners to Google Cloud Next this week, and tens of thousands of partners who are tuning in virtually. 

Google Cloud partners have tremendous opportunities to help customers transform with our expansive and open platform for AI. We are committed to supporting our partners at every level of our AI stack, with a partner-led approach to services and delivery; growing incentives and rewards; new opportunities for training and differentiation; and optimized routes-to-market to help partners close larger deals faster, and more often. 

For example, this year, we increased our investments into incentives and other programs by as much as 10X for both systems integrators and software vendors to implement Google Cloud generative AI. We also doubled rewards for services partners who drive more workload adoption and accelerate adoption of key products, and we recently grew our new logo incentives for sales and services partners across both Google Workspace and Google Cloud.

This partner-first approach is why Palo Alto Networks is selecting Google Cloud as its AI provider of choice. And it's also why Broadcom will migrate its VMware workloads to our infrastructure and use Vertex AI to enhance customer experiences. Finally, it’s why global consulting groups like Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Deloitte, HCLTech, KPMG, McKinsey, and PwC are expanding their practices and have already completed more than 500,000 generative AI enablement sessions.

At Next ‘24, we’ll highlight important updates with these companies and how they are supporting customers’ AI and cloud-driven transformations.

Supporting more platforms, services, and hardware from NVIDIA on Google Cloud

We give customers and partners the freedom to choose the infrastructure that best suits their needs, offering a wide selection of TPUs and NVIDIA GPUs from both Google Cloud and leading silicon partners. This week, we’re announcing that TPU v5p, our most powerful TPU to date, is now generally available. We’re also thrilled to expand our partnership with NVIDIA. Last month at NVIDIA GTC, we announced that Google Cloud will be one of the first cloud providers to make the new NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform available to our customers and partners. At the end of this month, they will also be able to access A3 Mega instances, which are powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs with double the interconnect bandwidth from A3 instances. 

This broad selection of high performance infrastructure is one reason that 90% of all generative AI “unicorns” (those with a market valuation over $1 billion) are Google Cloud customers, and it ensures that our partners can offer customers the greatest choice of how to build and run their AI workloads.

Enabling the data infrastructure underlying AI with our partners

Every AI project starts with getting a handle on your data estate. Our customers and partners are using BigQuery, the leading data warehouse service, to build the underlying data infrastructure for their AI implementations. They are also using our open approach to connect with third-party data platforms from partners like Confluent, Databricks, Elastic, MongoDB, and others. And customers and partners are connecting their enterprise applications, such as Workday and Salesforce, with Google Cloud databases like AlloyDB and BigQuery. 

In short, by using Vertex AI, customers can connect their AI models to our data platforms and databases, as well as third-party data platforms and applications, ensuring they are grounded in the latest, relevant business data — and thus deliver the best possible results.

Expanding the choice of partner foundation models on Google Cloud

From the start, we’ve prioritized giving our customers and partners access to a broad, curated set of AI models. Today, Vertex AI Model Garden supports more than 130 foundation models, including our own first-party models, open models like Llama and Gemma, and popular models developed by partners like Anthropic, Cohere, Mistral, and more. Last month, we announced that Anthropic’s latest LLMs, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku, are now generally available to customers and partners through Model Garden and Google Cloud Marketplace.

We’re also committed to making it easy for developers to use Google Cloud infrastructure for training and inference of a much wider range of open models. Earlier this year, we announced a partnership with Hugging Face, which now allows developers to quickly deploy hundreds of thousands of models through the Hugging Face platform on Google Cloud.

Finally, it’s also simple for customers and partners to utilize Gemini models through our partners’ platforms, including companies like Salesforce and SAP. This week, we’re announcing that Gemini models will be available in the SAP Generative AI Hub, providing streamlined access to powerful models for thousands of SAP customers.

Expanding access to AI developer tooling and applications 

We want Google Cloud to be the best place for customers, partners, and developers to build new AI models, capabilities, and applications. To date, we’ve helped more than 1 million developers build with generative AI by introducing our state-of-the-art models in popular tools like Vertex AI, Colab, VS Code, JetBrains, Replit, and Stack Overflow. At Next ‘24, GitLab is also announcing that its authentication, security, and CI/CD integrations with Google Cloud are now in public beta for customers.

Of course, customers can easily find, buy, and deploy AI solutions at every layer of the stack through Google Cloud Marketplace, including important AI applications from ArizeAI, Cast AI, Gretel, OctoAI, VEED, and Writer. 

We continue to see momentum from the world’s largest software and data companies co-selling with us. In the last six months, many of our partners have introduced new AI apps and solutions in Google Cloud Marketplace, including Broadcom, Deloitte, Five9, Kinaxis, MicroStrategy, NielsenIQ, Quantiphi, ServiceNow, Shopify, Box, Trend Micro, Twilio, and UiPath.

Bringing AI capabilities to enterprise apps and software

But it’s not just startups and tooling companies partnering with Google Cloud on AI. Market-leading technology and ISV partners have also embraced Gemini models and Vertex AI to bring gen AI capabilities to their products and services, such as Salesforce, Workday, Canva, UKG, OpenText, and announced today, HubSpot. These partners are using our gen AI capabilities to launch important new customer-facing workflows like summarizing documents, building job descriptions from scratch, or helping legal teams parse difficult contractual language.

This week, we’re thrilled that our partners will roll out even more AI-powered capabilities in their products, particularly those working in critical areas like cybersecurity and data analytics. For example, in the cybersecurity space, Palo Alto Networks is naming Google Cloud its AI provider of choice — it will use Gemini models to improve threat analysis and incident summarization for its Cortex XSIAM platform. Additionally, Crowdstrike is integrating its Falcon Platform with Google Cloud products, while Exabeam is using Google Cloud AI to improve security outcomes for customers. And the global managed security services company Optiv is expanding its support for Google Cloud products, applying our cloud and AI capabilities to drive better security outcomes for clients.

In the data analytics and DevOps space, companies including Alteryx, Dynatrace, and Harness are launching new features built with Google Cloud AI to help their customers derive more value from business data and improve the productivity of everyone who works with data. These features include new tools to automate workflows, support data governance, and enable users to better observe and manage the data powering their critical business applications.

Expanding AI implementation services from our ecosystem 

We’re partner-led in services and delivery, which means the vast majority of our customers are working with both Google Cloud and an expert partner to implement our AI services. This unique approach scales the AI opportunity to tens of thousands of expert services and delivery providers around the world. We continue to provide customers with the expert capacity they need to execute their AI-driven transformations. 

To date, our services partners have taken more than a half a million generative AI courses to support customers. Our global systems integrator and global consulting partners alone have committed to train more than 200,000 experts on our gen AI solutions — including Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, HCLTech, KPMG, Kyndryl, McKinsey, and PwC.

We’re focused on providing these partners with the right resources, rewards, and upskilling opportunities to help them grow their businesses and support customer success. This year, we’re expanding support for partners across all of these areas, including:

• A new Generative AI Services Specialization for partners who demonstrate the highest level of technical proficiency with Google Cloud gen AI. This specialization will unlock earlier access to Google-led gen AI projects, additional funding for gen AI assessment work, and increased access to AI resources, partner marketing funds, and more. An initial group of partners that have achieved the new specialization includes Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Datatonic, Deloitte, Quantiphi, Searce, TCS, and Wipro.

• New Generative AI Delivery Excellence and Technical Bootcamps, which will provide partners with tools, technology, and expertise to enhance their businesses with AI.

• A new user experience for our Delivery Readiness Portal, which will simplify access to important resources for partners to ensure optimal delivery quality for customers.

• More advanced Challenge Labs in generative AI, which provide comprehensive labs that prepare engineers for common migration scenarios.

Validating partner solutions through Google Cloud Ready

While all of these programs and updates help support our partners directly, our Google Cloud Ready programs give them an opportunity to validate and differentiate their integrations with customers. Today, we’re announcing significant expansions of three Google Cloud Ready initiatives. We’re welcoming 21 new partners to our Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery initiative, which now has a total of 101 partner solutions validated across 95 partners. We’re also adding five new partners to our Google Cloud Ready - AlloyDB initiative, which now has 47 partner solutions validated across 43 partners. Lastly, we’re adding five new partners to our Google Cloud Ready - Cloud SQL initiative, for a total of 39 validated partners. 

New partners include: 

• Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery: Actable, AgileData, Amplitude, Boostkpi, CaliberMind, Calibrate Analytics, CloudQuery, DBeaver, Decube, DinMo, Estuary, Followrabbit, Gretel, Portable, Precog, Retool, SheetGo, Tecton, Unravel Data, Vallidio, and Vaultree

• Google Cloud Ready - AlloyDB: Boostkpi, DBeaver, Estuary, Redis, Thoughtspot, and SeeBurger

• Google Cloud Ready - Cloud SQL: BoostKPI, DBeaver, Estuary, Redis, and Thoughtspot

We’re also launching an entirely new Cloud Ready designation for partners building integrations with our Google Distributed Cloud offerings. Partners already validated for this program include Canonical, CIQ, Elastic, MongoDB, Palo Alto Networks, and Starburst. For customers that need sovereignty-compatible solutions, Clarence, T-Systems, and WWT each deliver offerings as Managed GDC Providers.

Announcing our annual partner award winners

Finally, we’re honored to highlight the winners of Google Cloud’s partner awards, which celebrate the transformative impact and value that partners have delivered for customers over the past year. Our partners are constantly innovating on behalf of customers, and we are continuously impressed by their ability to solve large, complex problems with Google Cloud’s technology. To discover more exciting partner solutions, see our full list of partner award winners. 

Google Cloud is a partner-first organization, and we’re grateful to work with such a diverse and growing community of companies. These partners are vital to Google Cloud’s success, and we’re proud of the significant role they have played helping customers adopt gen AI, modernize critical workloads, improve cybersecurity, and more.