The Evolution of the Cloud GTM Ecosystem & What's Next
The cloud ecosystem is booming, as more companies scale their infrastructure, partnerships, and revenue through the hyperscaler Cloud Providers. Setting the right foundations and nailing the scale requires collaboration with highly seasoned experts. Tackle is proud to launch the first-of-its-kind Cloud GTM Ecosystem for ISVs, cloud services partners, channel partners, and technology leaders. Hear from our Chief Cloud Officer and get insights into the future of the cloud ecosystem from a few of our launch partners, including DoiT, Drata, G2, and World Wide Technology.
How's everybody do it?
Good.
How are you?
Awesome.
Thanks for being here.
Day two of cloud go to market XP.
Got some esteemed friends and colleagues and our friend Jack is an account down
to our
tornado.
So we're hoping he can stay with us the entire unit of session.
Very nice.
Yeah, no doubt man.
Stay safe.
Thanks everybody for being here.
Just quick housekeeping if you're here yesterday.
You know the drill.
If you weren't welcome.
If you're having any troubles with the platform connectivity, anything else
feel free to reach
out at [email protected].
We love the chat.
There's a session, specific session, a public session, which kind of lasts all
day and then
a Q and A as well.
If you want to message your friends directly, there's a capability for that.
As well, we do have folks from tackle, folks from our partners and the ISP
community watching
the chat.
My favorite answer is the ones that come from other ISVs that are navigated the
same
thing or have an opinion.
So please ask questions and feel free to answer them as well.
Share some best practices.
If you need to duck out, take a meeting, buy a break, whatever, all the
sessions are recorded.
We'll make them all available at the end of the event.
And finally, we love social.
So share on social, grab some screen grabs, share what you learned, your
favorite talks
of the last two days and build some excitement.
But we're almost trying to build as an industry together.
So this morning's session is about the evolution of cloud go to market and what
's next.
I'll show you back.
So I've been in and around this world for about 10 or 12 years now.
And it's really been fascinating to see how it's developed and how the
ecosystem of partners
is developing around the cloud providers.
And I'd like to thank Google Cloud, AWS and Zoom info for sponsoring the event
and more
importantly for participating in the event.
We heard from all of New Year's today, we got some awesome feedback on their
presentations
and the learnings they shared with all of us.
Today we're going to drill down of it.
Yesterday was kind of more C-suite executive level.
Today we're going to drill down in a little more of the how to's.
What are the best practices?
What can we learn from other customers and other partners?
So if you're curious about what does maturity look like inside of my ISV from
the earliest
days to a bigger motion?
If you're wondering what a data-driven approach is, if you saw Dylan's session,
he's closing
keynote yesterday, there's an awesome view into what we're doing today with
data, but
more importantly, where we think we can go.
If you're talking to your CFO about sales efficiency and how to drive bigger
deals faster,
how to share a budget in a better way, today's the day for you.
If you're wondering about CoSEL, what does it mean for me?
What does CoSEL mean at all?
Is it a noun?
Is it a verb?
I hear all sorts of things.
We'll be talking about that.
There are some awesome sessions yesterday from AWS and Google around that.
There are more sessions today.
And if you're worried about operational excellence, like I did this for five
deals or 10 deals,
but how do I do it for 100 or 1,000?
We've got some great things planned for you today as well.
So I'm Sanjay Mehra.
I'm the Chief Cloud Officer at Tackle.
My team is the stewards of our relationships with the big cloud providers, and
we work extremely
closely with the clouds in our product organization to make sure as new
capabilities come out
from AWS, from Google, from Microsoft, that we bring it to life for ISVs.
And with hundreds of ISVs and billions of dollars in cloud go to market, we've
got a
pretty good idea about what ISVs need, and we take that responsibility very,
very seriously.
So today I'm joined by four colleagues, Thomas, Kevin, Christine, and Jack.
I'll give each of you a minute to introduce yourselves, your company, your role
in the
company, and just for fun.
And I didn't prompt you guys on this.
So sorry, but maybe share if you've got a favorite podcast or a favorite book
that you're
listening to that you think the audience could benefit from.
I'd love you to share that as well.
Thomas, we'll start with you.
Great to see everyone.
Thomas Bush, I lead and co-created our ISV Go Global program at Do It
International.
We're a top global cloud partner in the space.
And top podcast, put me on the spot.
Recently, I got into plan to the gods.
Highly recommend.
Awesome.
The best questions the one you're not prepared for, that keeps it fun in life.
Yeah.
It's kind of a layup, though, as long as you're doing something.
Christine, how about you?
Hey, everyone.
My name is Christine Lee, and I am the VP of Global Partnerships at G2.
You'll learn a little bit about G2 if you haven't heard of us in a few more
minutes.
Top podcast.
So interesting.
Recently, I've been really getting into a good morning ecosystem, ran by Brian
Garvey
and the HubSpot team.
It's been as we start thinking about how do we scale our ecosystem and how do
we work
with solution partners.
It's been a very informative podcast for me, too.
Fantastic.
And Kevin.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Kevin Crevel, the SPP of Global Partnerships at Dratte, Compliance
Automation
ISV.
Favorite book is a book called Love Winds by a guy named Bob Goff, just about
living
a purpose-driven whimsical life.
Just a collection of his stories that are pretty challenging for somebody who's
sitting
at a desk all day.
No doubt.
And last but not least, Jack.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, Jack French.
So I had our cloud practice at worldwide technology.
So all things pre-sale, solution development.
That includes marketplace and our managed consumption or resale business.
I think for work, cloudcast is the podcast that I try to stay up on.
And then, personal, this real survival stories I found myself listening to
lately that has
got me sucked in.
Just crazy survival stories from people.
Awesome.
Yeah, thanks for sharing those.
I listened to a podcast over the weekend.
It was a Brené Brown unlocking us.
I'm a ballator for the last four or five years in shit, I guess, named Esther P
eralle, who
talked about the real AI, which was artificial intimacy.
And the one liner that resonated with me most was I have a thousand good
friends, but
none of them will take care of my cat.
So I encourage you to turn into that one.
All right, agenda wise, I'm going to set the stage a bit, talk about the
perspective
that I've seen over the last decade or so.
Before coming to tackle three years ago, I lived inside of an ISV called Trend
Micro.
A multi-billion dollar global company and helped transform into SaaS and into a
cloud
go-to market strategy.
And now I have the pleasure of helping hundreds of our customers do the same
rather.
Then I'll share a special announcement.
We're rolling it out today, so you're on the first to hear it.
And then we'll dive in with our guests and learn more about how they're helping
ISVs
build this new revenue channel.
All right.
So if we look back on the history, like 10 years ago, 2014, 15, 16, cloud go-to
market
and marketplace listing were kind of synonymous terms.
And I remember executive meetings and boardroom discussions where a marketplace
listing was
like your badge of cloud validation.
Like, I'm a cloud company.
I have a partnership with Google.
I'm in a marketplace.
But we figured out that when you build it, they don't come and to see a buyer's
wasn't
knocking at the doorstep to consume that listing.
And that sparked the broader adoption of CoSEL.
Even though CoSEL programs had already existed, kind of this marketplace
dynamic and the lack
of buyer demand really sparked the new generation of CoSEL and the systems and
the programs
and the incentives that came along with it.
But that brought this unbridled enthusiasm and a little bit of confusion.
Like some ISVs said, I'm going to share all of my pipeline with the cloud
providers and
went with their hands out and said, I need help.
Others said, I'm a little bit nervous.
I don't understand.
Maybe I also compete with the clouds in some way, shape or form.
I'm only going to share deals where I know I need really specific help that are
really
well qualified that I'm about to close and maybe I just need to find some
budget.
Others wrestled with new versus renewal.
What should I share?
A lot of CFOs were saying, I don't know if I want to share anything and take a
deal through
a marketplace where back then you might be paying 13 to 20% in a listing fee
today, 3%
or less across all the major cloud providers.
But a lot of confusion around what does this mean to my business?
What does it mean to my margins?
What does it mean to my traditional channel?
And that's fun.
This need for data, which most commonly is referred to as propensity to buy,
which is
what are the deals that are most ripe for cloud CoSEL?
What are the deals that are most ripe for marketplace?
And you started seeing this information feedback to ISVs so they could get more
intentional
about CoSELing.
They could raise the fidelity of the data they were sharing.
They could ask for help more specifically.
So that was a lot of fun.
And then we saw the transition as revenue went from 0% to 2%, 5% or 10% or 20%
of revenue.
Suddenly we saw the C-suite paying attention.
And most importantly, we saw the CRO raising their hand and saying, I want to
control that.
This is no longer an experiment in my alliances team and part of my cloud
partnership.
This is a part of my revenue engine and maybe the most meaningful part of my
revenue engine.
And my revenue engine lives inside of the tools I already use, primarily my CRM
system
and primarily Salesforce.
So it's actually we've done a ton of work over the last year, year and a half
to make
sure when we bring things to life with the cloud providers, we bring it to life
with
the tools that our customers already use.
And when we talked to those customers, we found some commonality.
And we found that tackle is one partner in that ecosystem, but there are
actually many
partners in that digital tech stack and that digital sales stack and partners
driving
real business transformation.
So today, I'm extremely excited to announce Tackle's Cloud Go-to-Market
ecosystem.
We have three main goals.
The first is to support our ISVs in every way we can alongside our partners to
make Cloud
Go-to-Market the preferred route to market for software companies.
The next is to provide ISVs with the tools and expertise they need from the
very earliest
days of exploring Cloud Go-to-Market through an at scale motion that represents
hundreds
of millions of dollars.
Or if you heard John's keynote yesterday, perhaps we'll see the first ISV do $1
billion
in annual sales through marketplace this year.
And the last is to serve the cross-functional organization.
We need to be a partner not just to the sales team, but to the product team in
the back
office and the ecosystem is designed to meet all of those needs.
We've set up our ecosystem in four main pillars and we're going to hear about
many of these
today.
The first is solution providers and technology partners, channels and resellers
, and finally
go-to-market services.
We're really fortunate to have 11 launch partners today.
Names and logos on the screen.
Hey, sorry.
Sanjay, I don't think you're sharing your slides.
I'm not sharing my slides.
Yeah.
That's a problem.
I can see my slides being shared.
All right, sorry about that, folks.
Let me figure out why I'm not sharing slides.
Thank you for calling that out.
Can you see that now?
There we go.
Gotcha.
Whoo!
All right, so you're on a cloud GT and ecosystem slide with 11 logos?
We are indeed.
All right, thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
Sorry for the confusion there.
I'm staring at a screen that's being shared.
So we have 11 great partners to learn more about them.
Visit the tackle website.
We have some simple value props up there.
And if you're interested in becoming a partner, we'd be delighted to talk to
you.
You can follow this link out on the website.
Reach out to us.
We can talk about how you're sharing or serving your customers, how we're
serving ours.
Make sure we have a great value prop to take to the market together.
So further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Thomas and do it to talk about
what we're
doing together.
We have a great solution providers as specialized organizations, helping ISPs
in cloud migrations,
satisfying applications, helping with cloud cost management, but fundamentally
helping
the business transformation that's happening inside of software companies.
So with that, Thomas.
Thanks, Sanjay.
And yeah, super grateful to be here, excited about what tackle's been doing for
several
years, but especially where we're headed together.
So for those of you who haven't heard of do it, I'm going to give just a super
quick
high level.
And as Sanjay said before, this is day two.
So my hope is that we can get pretty quickly into, hey, what does this look
like for us
and what's some clear takeaways for you.
So and do we've got three big pillars which are represented on the top with the
solve advantage
and navigator.
So fundamentally, we provide best in class enterprise support advisory
consulting.
Do it advantage is for those of you who might have known do it years ago, our
primary business
model back then was being a reseller.
And we still lean into that today and provide a lot of value and cost
optimization.
And then our third big pillar is the do it navigator.
This is our cloud cost management tool, single pane of glass for multi cloud
and ISV data,
cost intelligence, and automated reporting so that you can take all of the
noise and
the cloud spin space and a granular custom way, create reports and intelligence
that
mean something to your business leaders.
So what I thought would be really helpful would be to talk about a couple of
the ways
that we see this cloud go to market ecosystem working really well.
And when do it began leaning in, we had a ton of partners that were all
valuable in
the ecosystem.
And that level two and level three maturity has been us realizing that there
are a couple
of key partners that have the perfect overlay and the perfect crossover with us
And we're always looking when we meet partners to think about how can we
address something
that's out of scope that's within their normal cadence or how could they
address something
for our customers that's slightly out of scope for our normal cadence.
So there's a hundred people that probably want to partner with many of you
today.
And a lot of these examples draw back on that core point.
So with tackle, for example, there's a lot of customers that might approach
tackle that
they might have a conversation with.
And in that discovery, they might realize that the app really isn't ready for
marketplace
or that the future state of the app is going to be much better suited for
marketplace than
where they're at today.
So that's where tackle might introduce customers to do it and say, hey, can you
, before we
push on this marketplace thing, let's first address the app modernization.
For anyone who's been deep in the AWS ecosystem, you'll probably have heard of
the ISV accelerate
program and a core component or prerequisite of that is the foundational
technical review.
So that's something to do with those all day long.
Like our senior cloud architects spend a lot of time in the AWS best practices
providing
context.
So this is another area where we kind of figured out that AWS or tackle others
might introduce
us to customers because we can help with that particular piece.
On the flip side, if you look in this kind of the second column of examples, we
're always
looking for ways that we can support this ecosystem.
So on the second one, when our customers come to us and say, hey, how do we
level up our
marketplace go to market enablement?
That's where we know that if you're not already being showcased in G2 or if you
're not already
leveraging some of tackles like data intelligence about propensity to buy with
your existing
pipeline, then that is going to be more actionable and more immediate return
than something that
do it might directly offer.
So as you're thinking about how to put these things into practice, it's super
important
to think about where are these specific crossovers where what you do best has
an immediate adjacency
that can both feed you and give you the opportunity to work with other partners
that all drive
this cloud go to market success.
So withdraw it a similar like on the left, you can see that within do it solve,
we'll
have a lot of security reviews, but at some point it actually makes a lot more
sense for
us to refer a customer to a piece of technology that can help automate their
compliance instead
of a do it effort that's a really technical advisory.
And similarly, if the Drought team gets asked a ton about security reviews,
that's maybe
AWS specific, but not compliance automation specific, they might refer
customers to us.
So let's jump over to the next page or next slide.
So some specific call to actions, what we've learned by doing this hundreds of
times with
ISVs globally is if you're pre marketplace, number one piece of advice is find
out from
your internal stakeholders and leaders, what is the information they need and
what is their
current perception of this effort so that you can go gather that information
and enroll
folks on to your cause.
So I know yesterday there was a lot of talk from the C level perspective, but
listen,
like almost everyone here is you're here because you're a high performer and
the cross
functional nature of go to market success in the cloud.
It is going to expose you if you're not enrolling your entire team in this
effort.
So number one takeaway here is like if you're technical team, if you're C level
, if they
don't have a shared vision for what we're up to, there's some very specific
things that
you can bring to them to help enroll them in this new vision, such as tackles
offer to
review, I think it's 250 or so leads for free just to show you the propensity
to buy through
the marketplace that you might not already have.
So if you haven't already captured that information or that gotten similar
information from G2,
you can take back to your executive team and say, here's why we really need
full buy in
and a cross functional team to accelerate this.
That's like day one activity when this session is over.
If you're post marketplace, say as I mentioned this before, but having a
conversation with
your CFO, even something about like clarifying the renewal strategy, like how
much faster
could your team execute on existing business and reduce churn by taking a small
hit on
maybe the feed that you'll pay through the marketplace, but ultimately your
velocity
is going to be substantially higher.
So my hope is that one of these things is a clear takeaway.
Usually when we go through these with our customers one by one, we'll identify
an immediate
opportunity that costs you nothing but has a exponential impact on your
trajectory for
the next quarter.
Back to you, Sanjay.
Awesome.
Thanks Thomas.
So one of the things that we predicted in our last state of cloud go to market
report
attack on was that today's cloud go to market is really driven by a lot of
incentives.
Buyers are in the center to drive down cloud committed spend agreements with
Google or
Amazon or Microsoft.
Sellers inside those cloud environments are in Senate with commission and
quarter retirement.
I as these are in Senate with special programs and MDF funds and everything
else.
But we actually think is cloud go to market continues to build to be a bigger
and bigger
percentage overall B2B B2B spend that the real true inherent values in this are
going to
come out.
And that's in becoming a massively efficient revenue channel.
And when we look at the tech stack around that, it's actually pretty robust.
And if you want your buyers to discover your products through a cloud and in a
marketplace,
what are you doing for buyer discovery?
How are you stimulating that motion?
Maybe ultimately you want to get to a PLG strategy.
If you're in procurement, how do you shave time off of vendor onboarding?
How do you shave time off of legal cycles?
There's some amazing tools out there to really optimize the entire the system.
So I'm thrilled to have Kevin from DRATA and Christine from G2 talk about how
their organizations
are helping ISPs maximize and accelerate this motion.
Cool.
Thanks, Ajay.
So, DRATA, like I said at the top of the session, DRATA is a compliance
automation SaaS provider.
We are really helping companies focus on if they've never achieved Sock 2 or
ISO or GDPR
HIPAA before, many other frameworks and then those that have that are trying to
better
maintain it on a continuous basis.
Effectively, for those of you who have used like a mint.com, rest in peace
because it's
no longer on the Intuit platform anymore.
But imagine with mint.com for budgeting, you're connecting your bank accounts
to be able to
pull in that data using Mint to continuously monitor to see how spending is
going.
And then you put in budget restraints and say, "Hey, if I go over $200 a month
in gas,
let me know.
I don't want to do that."
DRATA is very similar.
Your tech stack is your bank accounts, your controls that lead up to making
sure you're
compliant are your budget things just like Mint as, which is kind of serendip
itous our
VSPP product.
Sorry.
Came from Intuit.
He was actually the founding member of TurboTax Live on the product side.
And so what DRATA's built is it's really clean, very easy to use UI that today
is really
focused on helping companies become compliant for the first time or again,
better maintain
the existing compliance they already have.
And that kind of speaks to what we've done in the first three years of being in
the market,
already signed over 4,500 customers.
That has created a pretty big challenge for our finance team.
So actually, the impetus originally behind going into marketplace and getting
rolling
was driven by a number of factors, but finance surprisingly was a big one for
us because
trying to be able to manage all those contracts, especially for our average
customers.
A lot of them are in the Series A, Series B space.
They're not necessarily working with the channel yet and they're moving so
quickly that that's
something that we kind of work on getting them to it like the time of renewal.
So these customers are buying through marketplace.
Last year at ReInvent, they featured three companies on the CoSEL leaderboard.
It was MongoDB CrowdStrike.
The two of those I think combined for about $100 billion market cap and then D
RADA, which
we're no we're close to any of that.
But the reason for that is because we're actually using tackle and a lot of
what we're doing
that we'll talk about here in a second to be able to sell to these companies
who don't
even have a commitment.
So whereas that's been traditionally, hey, getting into marketplace, go up some
of the
boings and the USAAs that have committed spends with one of the cloud providers
98% I want to say of the transactions we use in marketplace are companies that
have no
committed spend, have never bought through marketplace at all, may not even
have a marketplace account
yet and are spinning those up to be able to work with DRADA.
So I just kind of talked about it at the top.
When you're thinking about working with these marketplaces with these cloud
providers, you're
either all in or you're not.
There's really no in between.
And so that's where DRADA has gone all in with AWS and become kind of where we
're at.
We'll go to the next slide that talks more about how we're leveraging tackle
for that.
If you go to the next slide here.
So my background, I was formerly at experience.
We got acquired by Palo Alto Networks.
I've seen how at a large scale things are done with these cloud marketplace
providers.
I think the challenge becomes that really to win, you've got to get the field
engaged.
You've got to get your sellers winning in the field with the AWS sellers or
and Microsoft.
And so that means empowering them to do all that.
I have a team of two on my side that manage the AWS relationship, but the
challenge becomes,
even if you're, we did a thousand offers last year, we'll probably do 2,000
private offers
this year.
But even if you're doing a hundred or so, if your team is the one responsible
for getting
all those offers out the door, that's challenging.
One from a resourcing perspective, but two from the sales team is just not
doing it.
They're not actively engaging in it.
And so what we've used tackle to do a number of things, which is kind of start
with scaling
a marketplace.
We've used the sales force integration to integrate with our CPU system so that
it's
actually our sales team who's doing all the private offers, not the cloud
alliances team
under me.
And that's helped us really create scale really quickly.
It's got the team to buy in.
It's got the knowledgeable in what they're doing.
And then it allows them, because then we're using the co-sale integration with
tackle as
well, they say, Hey, let's have all of our pipeline getting pushed into ACE.
And so when there's opportunities where a sales rep at AWS has an actual
relationship
with that customer and is active with them, we're bringing them into the
opportunity to
help us with it.
And again, that's for the propensity to buy so that the whole top row really
ties together,
because it's very easy for us to then say, okay, we've got this propensity to
buy data.
It's medium or high in marketplace, which means they're spending enough that
they're
definitely going to have some type of account manager relationship with the AWS
side.
Those are the ones we're going to go focus on.
And again, you'd be surprised that a lot of us that have gotten into
marketplace historically,
we want to sell the Boeing, we want to go get that committed spend from some
large enterprise
customer.
There's a lot more companies out there now, and the 100 employees in up space
that are
really ready to go and doing a lot with AWS.
The other thing to keep in mind, I'm okay giving away our trade secrets at this
point,
because we're so far ahead.
I'm not really worried about that slipping.
For us, it's not about just winning the mind share against our competitors.
It's winning the mind share against the rest of you, right?
Because it's AWS can work with any vendor they want.
It doesn't matter about the space.
And so for us, being able to register all of our pipeline to become in some
cases 10 to
20% of some of these AWS reps pipeline has been massive.
But it's also because a lot of the reps we're going after, the startup and S&B
reps.
And nobody's asking for their time.
Everybody's asking for the enterprise reps time, which is fine if that's your
business.
Obviously, you want to pursue that as well.
But there's a big portion of the AWS sales team that nobody's trying to talk to
right
now.
And that's where we've really cracked it open.
Last year, we saw just over 400 net new opportunities sourced by AWS
undoubtedly.
You're going to get some AOs registered by then that aren't in fact net new.
You've already got existing business there.
We had over 400 this year.
We anticipate that being over a thousand.
And again, that comes from getting your sales team engaged.
Like our sales team is literally owns the relationships with the AWS sellers.
My team is facilitating that and helping manage and enable it.
But it's very much led in the sales side now and it's become for our sales
leadership
team, a primary value driver for what they're trying to do.
So again, like you talk about velocity, what we've been able to do very quickly
I don't think what we've been doing is that difficult when you're using tackle
because
of the resourcing that we have.
Again, I think the top three on the top row speak to what we've been able to do
there.
The automation again, like making this a very easy experience for the sales
team.
That's what it should be.
We've partnered with the two partners that you see on this call here, WBT and
do it.
We've done CPPOs with both.
So when you bring in the channel partner as well, it makes it even more dynamic
and more
impactful for the relationships you're doing.
But again, like this all goes back to, I think there's a lot of other channel
partners not
speaking that obviously not WBT and do it who have leaned in.
But folks who haven't bought into CPPO yet that have kind of viewed AWS as
competitive.
And it's not.
Very much a one plus one plus one equals 10 if you allow it to be.
And I think that's where we've got this massive channel ecosystem.
A channel partner source over 30% of our business as a company.
And so being able to get all that kind of under the AWS umbrella of what we're
doing
has been massive.
And again, tackles at the center of all of that to make sure that we're
facilitating
and not slowing anybody down on the sales side.
Awesome.
Thanks.
You always remind me that your native language is cloud go to market Kevin.
So it's awesome to hear the back.
All right, Chris, let's keep rolling.
Thanks.
Thanks, Andre.
And Kevin, congratulations on your 711 very positive reviews on G2.
Got us doing great.
All right.
So for those who haven't heard of G2, G2 is the largest B2B software and
services marketplace
in the world.
We have over 2.5 million peer reviews collected over the last few years.
We're going to spread across 150,000 product listings across 2100 categories.
And every year we host over 90 million buyers who have identified that they
have a problem
that they need to solve come to G2 to try and find a solution and product that
's right
for their business, create a short list of vendors, compare those vendors,
research your
pricing, and validate their decisions through these trusted verify reviews.
At the end of it, G2 is where you go for software.
And if you're a buyer, if you're looking for software, it's going to be where
you need
to go to do your research.
And how we work with marketplaces is a very symbiotic relationship.
G2 is where you go to discover and research.
And then you go to the marketplaces to complete your transactions.
And this is the reason why in our customer base, we have 100% coverage of cloud
100 businesses
and as well as Fortune 500 customers.
So we could go to the next slide, Jay.
Awesome.
Perfect.
And like as a marketplace listing ourselves, we've leveraged tackle throughout
our journey
to power us to where we are today.
And we're really excited about that.
I want to tell you a little bit more about how we all come together in this fly
wheel cloud
marketplaces.
So G2 at the core of our business starts with your customer voice.
Our goal is to amplify your customer voice so that it builds trust and
transparency in
the software purchasing process.
And so that as a buyer, they can feel really, really good about the purchase
decisions that
they're making.
So all starts with reviews on G2.
Now what we do with those reviews is through my team, we syndicate those
reviews across
a dozen cloud marketplaces.
I'll go into that in a little bit.
AWS, Microsoft Azure are a couple of cloud marketplaces that leverage just G2
reviews
to power their user and buyer engagements.
Next, as your reviews are driving traffic and discoverability to your brand on
G2, all
of those traffic turns into buyer-intense signals.
And those buyer-intense signals represent the 5% of prospects who are actually
in market
to buy today.
When you pair that, those powerful buyer-intense signals with tackles
propensity data to show
you who is actually likely to transact in the marketplace, you have a really
complete picture
of where your buyers are, who's ready, and how they purchase.
And lastly, as a base, all of this traffic, all of this data sits in our market
intelligence
platform that helps inform your business in their future go-to-market strategy,
helping
you yield more customers who will become future reviewers, who will continue to
drive more
traffic to your listings and continue to power your pipeline, and so goes the
cloud flywheel
that we continue to see.
Next slide.
So why we invest so heavily in cloud marketplaces is because we're seeing every
year, we're seeing
an increase in buyers going to cloud marketplaces as a preferred channel to
purchase.
We issue a buyer behavior research report every year.
This year ours will be coming out in June, but just as a sneak peek, we're
seeing over
the last year, we see a 5% increase, 5% point increase in the amount of buyers
who prefer
to go to cloud marketplaces to complete their purchase.
And a very large portion of that increase is coming from the C-suite executives
So we're seeing that shift, we feel internally this is why we're listed on AWS,
this is why
we leverage tackle for our go-to-market as well.
And when we look at our review syndication, I talked about the 90 million
buyers that go
to G2 every year.
When we amplify those reviews across the cloud marketplace ecosystem, that
number doubles
to 180 million annual buyers.
More specifically, when we dig into the impact of having G2 reviews syndicated
into the
marketplaces, we're seeing, for example, with AWS, a 13% higher likelihood to
complete
a purchase on any listing in AWS that has G2 reviews syndicated.
So there's a power across the board when we all come together and help just the
same
way as an ISV would leverage tackle to build and scale your cloud go-to-market
operations.
You'll be going to G2 to help you with discoverability and building the buyer-
intensive
nose to drive that pipeline forward.
Awesome.
Thanks, Christine.
I have a pretty clear message.
If you're selling in a marketplace, work with your marketing team, create r
aving fans,
get a lot of reviews and increase the likelihood for a buyer to buy.
So that's awesome.
Thanks for sharing.
And finally, I'm going to toss it over to Jack French at WWT, an organization I
've admired
for a long time as a guy who's been running around in software and technology
for a couple
of decades.
It's been fascinating over the last six or seven or eight years to watch
traditional
channels or traditional resellers turn into cloud solution providers.
WWT was one of the first courageous partners to raise their hand to go on that
mission.
Accent the helm of it.
And I'm excited for him to share what it means for ISV.
He's in what the opportunity is for other channel partners as well.
I appreciate it, Sanjay.
Thank you.
And so for anyone not familiar with WWT, quickly on our practice and WWT as a
whole,
we are privately held headquartered in St. Louis, minority owned, 20 billion or
so on annual
revenue.
Six billion of that is international, so we truly are a worldwide global
service provider.
We manage billions of dollars of ISV spend and OEM spend every year.
And so as Sanjay mentioned, figuring out how to tackle the marketplaces and
make sure
that we were aligning with the cloud service providers years ago was extremely
important
for us.
I think it was mentioned yesterday in the keynote, sellers want to sell, rev
iers want
to buy.
And that was a leading philosophy of ours years ago.
For one, maybe even to protect our business, but two, just to make sure that we
were where
our customers needed us to be.
For my cloud practice, what we focus on is, and I think someone mentioned that
earlier
even in the comments, you know, cloud go to market isn't just about building
landing
zones and migrating VMs and having a cloud presence.
It really, at this point, is about integrating into all the different outcomes
that we provide
for customers across customer experience, automation, the cybersecurity, the AI
and data.
Cloud is an implementation point that is leveraged across all of these
different solutions.
So it's important for my team to make sure that we understand what are the
leading ISVs
and OEMs and solutions that we can leverage to build good outcomes for our
customers.
And, you know, WTT is about 30 years old.
They've got a long history of building longstanding relationships with partners
, with the number
one partner for dozens of different leading ISVs and OEMs.
And so making sure that our solutions are integrating with those partners to
provide
compelling and needed solutions for our customers is what we focus on.
You know, we primarily play in the enterprise space.
So, you know, 90 plus percent of the Fortune 100, Fortune 500, and then in the
public sector
in sled space, we have a pretty heavy presence.
So, you know, making sure that we understand the ecosystem of public, hybrid
and private
and how solutions can, you know, play across all of those different cloud
operating models
is important for us.
And one of the ways that we do that in the differentiator for WTT is leveraging
our
advanced technology center.
And so the next slide you'll see here that the ATC or advanced technology
center is a
differentiator for us.
It truly is a multi-site data center.
And so, you know, why would the cloud guy care about a data center?
But for us, every large enterprise customer is trying to figure out how to
integrate their
cloud strategy with years of investment that they've made with technology
solutions across
their technology landscape.
And so in the ATC, we can build these integrated solutions.
We can POC and POV them.
I can mimic migration strategies down to the firmware version that they're
coming off of
in this environment.
We've got connectivity to Equinox and all the major cloud service providers.
And this environment allows us to be more than just a reseller or more than
just a bar.
It's a place that we can truly show value added integrated solutions with our
cloud
service providers and our most trusted partners.
So in this environment, you'll find labs that customers can spin up and see
what, you know,
head-off or follow or whiz or whatever it maybe looks like integrated into
their solution.
Or we build custom environments on demand for our customers and our partners,
you know,
to see again what these integrated solutions look like.
We will use this lab to, you know, certify partners on cloud service provider
hardware.
So when Outpost was deployed, we were certifying partners for Outpost Ready,
you Anthos and Azure
Stack deployments.
And so again, if you're not familiar with the ATC or this is somewhere that you
think
that we could partner to help accelerate, you know, your eyes for your software
solution.
I'd be, you know, interested in discussing more.
But you know, as I go to the next slide here, yeah, and thanks, Sanjay.
It's okay.
So how do we leverage all those tools to really be impactful?
And you know, everybody I think before me has said it perfectly.
I mean, the marketplace was scary for a lot of our field prior to us building
some maturity
in the space.
And I had a regional manager tell me years ago that the cloud marketplace felt
like a
chainsaw that he could either take off his own leg or take down a bear with.
And he didn't quite understand how to leverage, you know, this powerful
component of the
marketplace.
He was scared of it, but he knew that he needed to figure it out.
And so what we've found is leveraging tackle data.
We're able to get much more proactive.
And when the field doesn't feel like they're reacting to last minute customer
demand to
shift to go to marketplace or, you know, can we procure this in a different way
It allows us to get much more strategic to build comfort with the field and to
show them
the true power that the marketplace can provide.
We've been able to transact partners in a matter of hours that we don't even
have paper with
because we can leverage, you know, the joint paperwork with the cloud provider
instead
of going through a six month onboarding process of some, you know, new solution
that maybe
we haven't worked with before.
And so all across the board, this ability to be more proactive, leveraging
propensity
data from tackle or, you know, marrying it with our pipeline data in order to
get out
in front of deals has created comfort, which just has exponentially grown our
business.
We did our first marketplace deal five or six years ago.
We're now on the high nine figures.
I don't see any, you know, slowing down, especially another Google and
Microsoft are both open
for the channel.
And without that propensity data, I don't know if we would be growing as fast.
In addition to that, you know, our relationship with our cloud service
providers early on felt
very competitive.
Our field saw them as somewhat of a threat.
And so getting our field comfortable with partnering with Microsoft Amazon,
Google,
the Oracle, all the major CSPs took some doing and having Salesforce
integration, having
a quicker line of sight to connecting with the cloud service provider sales
teams has
really helped us build trust and really kick off that flywheel of PO and AO and
everything
else that we want to see from the CSPs.
And so Salesforce integration, automation of deal flow, propensity to buy data,
it's
just been critical for us in making our field more comfortable with partnering
with the
CSPs and opening up, you know, that their pipeline to them and what they've got
going.
But also it helps us get out in front of these deals.
So we're layering on value added professional services.
We're just a transactional arm.
I don't think we're as valuable in the channel.
And so we need to figure out, you know, how can we get in front of these deals,
figure
out advisory, consults or jewelry or deployment services that we can attach to
each one of
these, you know, ISV integrated solutions to get more sticky and provide value
to customers.
So again, we're not just a transaction arm, but hopefully that helps.
And I know we're running on science.
Okay, back to you.
That's awesome.
Thanks to Jack, Christine, Kevin, Thomas, LoveHavenia today.
Really thrilled your inaugural partners in our ecosystem.
Thanks to the audience for being here to help us celebrate a project that the
team's
been working on for quite some time.
We're excited to bring it to life.
We're more excited about what we're going to do together and more partners to
come.
Enjoy the rest of the day and the content.
Next up is maturity model delivered by Patrick and Aaron, I believe an awesome
session.
You tuned and thanks for coming to Cloud GTM XP.
Have a great day.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[ Silence ]