Ep.143-From Migration to Mastery: How to Dominate Google Cloud Pt.2/3 with Michael Williams
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Hey, everybody, welcome back. We’re talking about a hot topic today. It’s from migration to mastery, how to dominate Google Cloud and on with us today, we’ve got Mr. Michael Williams, Cloud Solution Consultant 3 at RapidScale on Google. Michael, welcome on, man.
Thanks for having me, Josh. And I sounded very proper with that number three at the end. Appreciate you.
I know. I don’t know what one thing we’re doing. I don’t care because we got number three. That means we’re going to get into some good stuff, man. So let’s jump into it. You’ve got a cool backstory.
Walk us through a little bit just for everybody to get to know you that hasn’t met you yet. Kind of how your career in this field got started, windy path, linear path. What is it?
I’d love to get started with that one. Well, originally, I come from tech management. So well, let’s take us back to my first seven years of PayPal, running our products there, got into the FinTech technologies there and moved away from the PayPal area and ran to Uber where I was also managing. And that’s where one of my good friends at Google pulled me over. He said, Michael, I know you’re in management, but I think cloud is a place where you should pivot to even though you have been managing people. And I said, I’m ready for a change. Let’s let’s roll this dice. That’s when I took a job being an account development rep for Google, got to work with the Chrome Enterprise team, got to work with the Google team. And after two years of working enterprise with them breaking into large accounts out of the southeast, you know, many of the many, many of the companies, I’m sure I got to do a little bit of training down the customer engineering route. After being on so many customer calls and getting that technology bite of like, hey, what are they doing with all this cloud? And how are they storing it? Got with my pod leader who was an engineer and went down that engineering track got my certification for Google Cloud that took me to Rackspace where I was able to be a Google Cloud shmee. And from there over to another var, overt soft choice where I got to run Google Cloud for the last for last two years over there. Becoming a 2022 Google seller all star and getting commits up the yin yang and taking care of our technology from Canada all the way down to here in Arizona.
I love it.
Love that, right? Such a different perspective, right? We haven’t talked a lot about Google Cloud on this show. So I think the listeners are excited. We’ve got so much that we can uncover right with what rapid scale brings to the table with your role.
And so let’s let’s let’s jump into that a little more. So obviously, everybody familiar with the channel, right? Got a great strong partnership with rapid scale. But now walk us through with what you guys are doing and a quick product highlight and we’re going to get into some individual products here. We’re going to get into the weeds in a second. But just talk talk a little about rapid skills, commitment, your role and kind of how you see that standing out.
Absolutely. Well, let’s start with rapid skills, commitment here.
Well, as you know, I’m sure Josh, like in this ever changing landscape that we have, you know, every business is at a different point in their technology journey. And now more than ever, tech is changing it, you know, a rapid rate. So here at rapid scale, we are, I’m going to say uniquely positioned being that we’re, you know, agnostic, we’ve got a AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, as well as, you know, on on prem data center help here.
As far as what we do now on the Google side, we’ve got us got us started on a full stack of like it services here, we present the full suite of enterprise products. And really, we meet our customers where they’re at. But Google Cloud being our our newest cloud venture, since we’ve been here.
I love that. And I think as partners go, you know, you checked off the boxes, right? AWS, cool, there’s people out there that do that. Azure, cool. There’s people out there that do that. Google, well, that that list is thin already, but add all three together. And that list is very, very, very small. So I think partners are really excited about this, because it presents so much opportunity, that they’ve just, you know, struggled to find a way to capture. So we’re super excited. And we’ll get into the products here in just a sec. Because I know you’ve got some, you got some experience here.
Before we do that, I want to hear from you. I always love to ask lessons learned something from a mentor, things that you’ve learned the hard way, just look back the last 10 or 15 years, give us a lesson learned.
Well, I’m gonna start with two here. I’m gonna start with one, I think will help everybody out the most. In a in this area that we’re in, in technology, I think it’s important to leave your ego at the door when it comes to speaking to your customers, right? We have a big pod of people that can come on to a call, right? I’m a I’m a SME for Google Cloud. We’ve got engineers, we’ve got architects, I think the important thing to do is bring the right team to the right call is number one is that I’ve that I’ve come to understand. And I think to say learning that the hard way, the easy way, I think all of us in sales have had a had a journey that we could have done a little bit better. And I think for me, having the right people on the call to begin with, and not wasting any piece of the sales process, has been the biggest thing I could put my put the feather in my hat on is show up correct, show up right. And that way, we can shorten the sales process and help our businesses out even quicker.
I love it. And I should call out to our good friend, Mr. Donovan Brady, for anybody that isn’t super deep yet on rapid scale, we had him on who leads up by the architecture team there at at rapid scale. So come back, go listen to Episode 112 and catch that as a primer if you need to kind of learn about the more broad all the things that rapid scale does and how it works and how it’s dialed in. Because today, we’re gonna get really specific. So I got a big section here, products and services that I want to get to. So obviously, this is big news, right? You guys coming in with Google Cloud. But I think the nuances here are, we’re gonna break this into what we have now. And then we’re gonna get into a little bit later about maybe what’s coming. So I want to talk about right now, high level first of, you know, types of offerings, and then we’re going to give them the products. So migrations, we can help on migrations. Yes. Yes. Pro serve work, SOW based work. Yes, we can help on that. Oh, yes, of course. Okay, yes. So let’s let’s we’ll get to what’s coming, right? What’s coming. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. But let’s, let’s break down these migrations and this kind of pro serve work, the things that help partners get in, uncover, find opportunities, find gaps, we got some products here to talk about. So I’m gonna just, I’m gonna call it a few. We can we can focus more on one less on one. But I’m thinking about things like the Google Cloud infrastructure as a service side of things, Google Cloud Storage, Google Data Catalog, as we think about AI and, you know, labeling, classifying products, big theory, VMware, Google Gemini, I mean, where do you want to start? So many?
Yes, so many good ones right there. Well, I mean, let’s first talk about let’s start let’s start with the easy path here, right? Lots of customers that we talked to are many different pieces of their of their transformation, we could be talking to a cloud native customer, we could be talking to a customer that’s been data center forward for the last 15 years. And, you know, not not one cloud person in there. But let’s let’s get started with like some some quick and easy transformations. Why Google would be a great start, right? Why do people use Google? Well, Google Cloud being kind of the last to the party, we are actually the most affordable cloud that there is out there. So lots of the time, people are going to be wanting to measure apples to apples, oranges to oranges. A lot of the time, you’re going to be finding that people that want to want to save the save those funds are going to be moving to Google Cloud. Why is it the most affordable cloud? Well, a lot of the internet’s backbone is going off of Google Rails, we’ve been a data company or Google’s been a data company for quite some time. And I think they leverage partners like you and I, Josh, to make sure that with them not being a customer service company, they lean into the expertise that people like us that us and tell our us have to bring people into that fold. And you talked about, you know, professional services and the leveraging of Google Cloud. I feel like where companies are learning the most right now is they’ve been having to come not only just out of pocket for the learning, but Google is very, very specific about us specific about making sure the technology lands properly for the business. So we lead with POCs proof of concepts. Never do we want somebody going in, talking about what could be the art of the possible. And then we get to the end of that road and we say, Oh, not possible. I think with building with Google altogether, it’s always been a measure twice cut once type of type of deal. And they help that with a they helped our customers out by helping with the funding in that in a lot of different ways, especially first time customers.
Yeah, I love that. I mean, we’ve seen some of that with the AWS map funding, right? We’ve seen some of that with Azure’s funding buckets. And so hearing about how aggressive Google is, right, I think we’ve learned it’s not a all funding is guaranteed. It’s a Hey, let’s look at the customer, let’s look at the opportunity. And let’s look at what they’re trying to do with Google. And then you and the you know, any additional folks on the rapid scale side, then present that idea, right? You’ve got the Google relationships to say, Hey, here’s the project, here’s the opportunity that we’re working on, we think it could amount to this, would you issue funding dollars for it, right? So I think the thought then is, let’s look at each of those opportunities. And, you know, let’s ask for that any chance we can, no guarantee that it’s going to get, it’s going to get funded. But you’ve seen them obviously very incentivized to want to move more migrations, presumably, my guess is they love to move people off AWS and Azure versus I
mean, it’s all it’s always fun getting people into Google, no matter how they how they get there. But definitely showing them the way and bringing them from another cloud is always fun.
You mentioned how AWS funds, I’ll give you like the verbiage here, right? So the AWS funding fund, partner development funds, PDF PSF funds, partner sponsored funds, they have many different ways for businesses to get started, get their toe in that water without having to bust into that, that, that that tech that that technology bucket for how much money everybody has for the year.
The budgets, sometimes they get thinner, sometimes they get thicker. But as businesses grow and modernize, I think it’s the the story of the how gets a little bit more difficult if you don’t have those those professionals in house. And that’s where I think, you know, that sweet spot reaching out to you us and partnering with us is one of those big pieces where we can get you to that sweet spot quicker. And we can help you get there before you before you spend that money out of pocket for something that it may or may not work.
So if I’m a partner, and I’m listening to this, and I’ve got maybe existing customers that I know have Google infrastructure or debating it, or I’m trying to tackle a new customer prospect.
If we say are you’ve established, obviously, there’s some cost, there’s some great cost benefits there. But if I look at it as just kind of a products to products, maybe what they have now versus what they could have, you need a couple of ways that you think things like, you know, you know, Google’s obviously got the data angle, they’ve had the data angle for a long time. But we’ll get to Gemini in a second and all of that. But I mean, what do you what products do you see standing out purely on on kind of their merit of how great they are?
Great question. Um, well, if we want to just take with we want to just take, you know, AWS versus Google, right? Even looking at the product stack. AWS has about three times as many products as Google does. But those products are in are in similar silos, right? We’ve got BigQuery and you know, that’s going to be handling a lot of our big data and pieces of that. But you can have those different pieces on the AWS side that might have two or three different products. I think when it comes to a playing well with others, Google builds technology, not only for Google, but things like Anthos with, you know, with their service mesh that works for AWS works for Azure, you know, look at your look at your micro services across all three clouds, very huge. But as far as like the the big differ big differentiation, between what’s awesome about Google, I think is going to be about the the usage on the inside. And for me, the graphic user interface, the gooey, as well as the savings that come behind that. Now, when you talk about customers moving migrating, you know, moving down this route, the best thing that I can say, and one of the things that brought me here to rapid scale, we are big on making sure everything is well architected. You’ve got, you’ve got engineers, architects, you’ve got a lot of people that, you know, have turnover in and out. When you come when it comes to working with Google, when it comes to working with rapid scale and your team as well, we’re big on well architected frameworks, we’re big on seeing what you have, where that data is at, is it usable data. And when you talk about, you know, AI and these pieces, Google’s big, huge, we’re huge on the AI front, especially with like, you know, the the partnerships that we have even with anthropic and our and our own AI internally. The biggest piece for customers right now is, are they going to be using or trying to get into AI because they want to catch up? And they’re afraid? Or are they trying to tune up something that they’ve started before? And are they getting the money out of out of what they’re doing? Is their data going to be usable enough to be able to get what they want and pull all of the all of those pieces out of it is another big thing that that Google, you know, leans on to? Makes sense. All right, let’s, let’s talk. Let’s go the AI side of things, right? So when you think about large language models, you know, I think everybody’s going through this process of what do I have? Where’s my data? Is it classified? Is it labeled? So obviously, when we talk about, we’ve done a lot, we’ve talked about Microsoft, and they’ve got Microsoft purview to help people label and classify before it then feeds into co pilot.
So now with Google, we’re talking about Google Data Catalog before it then feeds into, you know, either big,
big query or the Gemini design or whatever.
Correct.
Where do you feel that in a large language model world, again, if somebody’s they see the beauty of AI, and they go, we want that, we gotta go build that. And now the IT team is is tasked with, okay, we gotta go figure that out. What do you see the Google stack, you know, Gemini, and anthropic and all of those things standing apart?
Great question. Well, let’s just talk about the AI shift in general, and AI push. I feel like AI is kind of its own guys, right? Like, they are either out of fear or excitement trying to adopt. So we’ve got people that are exciting wanting to adopt. And you know, they feel like if they don’t invest now, they’ll be left behind is what a lot of my enterprise, you know, customers are talking about. And as I’m not sure if anybody out there has gone to Google Cloud next in the last year, but we could see that Wendy’s and, you know, fast food like that are trying to adopt as quickly as possible and see where they’re fitting. And so, you know, we’re trying to get people to be able to do that. And I’m gonna think that and I’m gonna say this out here, we have a pretty mature AI practice here, right? We got quite a robust team, we got six people with PhD credentials, including the technologies that GCP has to offer. And we like to take care of our AI, just like Google does in a very rational way, right? I think you touched on this is people talking about where’s my data? Is it good data? Is it usable? How are we going to visualize this data, right? And going down this route and in a couple of deals that I’ve already done in the past year, putting AI together with being able to visualize that to whether it’s your C-suite, whether it’s going to be your customer facing employees, it’s looping your AI with Looker on Google side, right? If I have some sentiment analysis that I want to get done, let’s just say I run a business that has some sort of sauces or some sort of anything where people can give you quick feedback. I can tap that into whether it’s TikTok, whether it’s Instagram, we can pull that data in. And it’s all about visualizing it the right way. Good if you can get a big long list of data and it shows you a couple pieces. But if I need to put this into something usable very quickly, this is where Google comes into this. It’s all about ease and use of its products. And I think when you’re talking about AI in general, there’s many different facets to that. It’s where’s my data? Where am I going to get it? And who am I going to deliver this to for end goal? And is this multiple? And how can I quickly get it there? And I think that’s where Google not only tying their AI practice in with how to visualize that without they’re doing again, the Looker play with it is big for customers as well, because they need to get the understanding down and need to adapt to the many different audiences that we’re speaking to.
It’s good. All right. So when we were when we were catching up last week, you were talking about just example after example, right? You’ve been in a lot of deals. And I think that’s what’s great. I think that’s what partners love to hear. And so there’s a there’s a theme that that every time I ask this question seems to come up. And that theme is, you know, when you bring in our teams,
and when you get into some of these opportunities, they tend to end up with a lot more great opportunity than we maybe thought that they would start with. And so can you walk us through just an example of previous success that you’ve had where you got brought in, you know, kind of what was the tech stack before? What was the business problem? I’m on partners just kind of hear an example. And what did it look like after?
Oh, I’d love to. I can bring up a very recent one.
Let’s say we start off with a cloud conversation. You know what I mean? We come in here, we take a look at an enterprise customers cloud spend. Let’s say they’re spending, you know, 500 to a million dollars a month. The first thing that we get brought in for might be to take a look at their at their how are they using this to like how the hell’s their bill breaking down? Is there any way that we can optimize this? Are the CPUs I’m using even being used, you know, at a good rate? Are they are they are at 40% or they’re all 80%? We get a lot when we first get in there and we get to see the console and we get to see how a business is, you know, putting together their cloud lifespan, right? How is it being used? Where’s the money going? Are these broken in the projects? I think the first thing that we do again, starting with the data, figure out where we’re starting with. Then we go down and we start uncovering these pieces. So for this customer, let’s just say they were spending, you know, let’s say 30 million dollars in a year. Alright, with these types of customers, it might start off where we’re talking about contracts. We’re talking about either a renegotiation or maybe adding in a smaller piece of some technology on AWS or Google. Alright, but once we get into there, let’s say that I need to now find some gaps in this, you know, in your bill. Then if somebody, let’s just say your containerized, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got Kubernetes running in here. Soon as we get into looking at how somebody’s tech stacks broken down, we get to see where those gaps are. And that’s when we get to start plugging in other technologies, kind of like Cast AI. Alright, let’s just talk about because Google has a great relationship with Cast AI and also Hugging Face. But let’s start with Cast AI. We can get a customer that thinks they’re doing a fantastic job. They’ve got the robust engineering team. They’ve got the architecture team. But lo and behold, we see that everything that’s running in Kubernetes isn’t optimized. Your $500,000 a month really should only be $380,000 a month. This commit that we were going to do for one year for 30,000 has now just uncovered another $400,000 deal that we can do to optimize. Now, in going through all these containerizations that we have, we figured out that your app isn’t completely broken down in its monolith. And we’re only monitoring Kubernetes workloads on 50% of your app. What’s the rest of it going to do if it breaks down? And these are those digging through and having these great conversations with not only, like I said, the right people on the phone, Josh, but also getting that data real time with our customers, right? Hey, here’s how this is going down. But let me show you what good looks like with another company that may be doing things similarly. And also digging into what’s important with a customer. If they’re, if let’s just say you’re about to IPO, somebody about to IPO is going to be way more concerned with where the budget’s going, where the money’s going, where the overhead’s sitting. So we may need to dive into that more, as opposed to somebody that may be overhired over the last two years. And now we’ve got someone managing our VMware stack. But we’re about to move VMware into Google Cloud VMware Engine. Maybe I don’t need three FTEs managing that. And we run into those situations. So kind of going down this line here, this could start off at a contract call, end up down the optimization route, and then turn that optimization route that we’re talking about right into professional services. And these are the three to five deals that you talk about for one customer, right? You talk about the stickiness that we want to get with any business, right? It’s nice to get one deal way better to get three to five. And going down this cloud conversation is a, I’m going to use the word fantastic way to uncover what people are doing with those tech stacks, and if they’re using them at an optimum level.
I like that. You know, I think what what people have, you know, shared with me of the way that this podcast has helped them before is sometimes I’m just trying to find a wedge in. So we’re always looking at what’s our wedge product? What what? Okay, maybe it’s today at security, tomorrow, it’s cloud on the next one, it’s SD WAN and sassy and things like that. And so I’d like, I like where this is such a wedge in, there’s just so many different ways to wedge in and optimize when, you know, from a Google Cloud perspective, that to your
point, we know that that just doesn’t stop with one deal, right? This is, this is a one time $50,000 engagement that we know if we do well, which we will uncover a lot in there, it’s going to lead to another engagement, another engagement and another engagement. So I love, you know, your expertise where you’ve had this experience that you know, all these products, you know, all the specific Google Cloud ecosystem products, because you’ve played in that forever. And you can bring that to bear and you just know that instantly. So I think it would be huge value for partners. If you’re listening, and you’ve got an opportunity, Michael needs to be part of that discovery call once we tee that up. I think that’s that’s that’s the thing partners are sitting here doing.
Oh, yeah, no, definitely bring bring us in. And I think you make a good point here, Josh, the relationship piece that rapid scale has created with Google and with all the rest of our the rest of our cloud, to be honest, it’s, it’s about making sure we’re not putting a square peg into a round hole, we want to fit the right pieces in the right places. But the reason to reach out to rapid scale, the reason the reason to reach out to your team and to Lars and to like bring all these pieces in, we have that relationship. And it’s about it’s about the quickness to not only like to market with some of the new technologies, but it’s about getting it in quickly. And introducing the introducing the partners that we’re talking to, to the greater team, right? If you haven’t worked with the engineering excellence team at Google, you may not know what what’s coming down the pipe. We do this weekly. If you haven’t talked to all of the field sales reps in an environment over here, you may not know what’s winning or you know, in this vertical. The beautiful thing about here and talking to whether it’s me or any of my experts here at rapid scale, it’s going to be that ability that we have to immediately bring a great relationship in. And also, we have so much to pull from from all of the data pieces from all the deals that we’ve sold, right? We want to make things easy for customers. And we want to bridge that gap. Because most customers haven’t even had a conversation with Google or Google or Google engineer, you get us in here, you pull us in, we will we will bridge that gap for you and meet you where you’re at, no matter where you’re at in that journey.
Awesome. All right. So we talked about high level on services. We talked about migrations. We talked about professional services, you know, defined SOW engagements, what we left out a little bit is what’s coming. So can you walk us through what’s coming? Whether that’s this year, whether that’s 2025, a little more that kind of managed services mindset?
Absolutely. Well, as we can see in this last like year, we’ve had big changes in lots of tech companies, whether it’s going to be security, whether it’s going to be Broadcom, VMware, takeover, those pieces. We want to make sure that we continually make things easy for customers as things go down, right? So let’s talk about what’s happened recently, even with VMware. You know, recently, whether you’re going to be going to VMware on Google Cloud and reducing your spin that way, or whether or not you’re going to be leveraging some of the again funding that they have for coming up in 2025. If you are a business and you have yet to completely transform or you’re looking to go multi cloud or you don’t quite have the bandwidth to get the ideas and to figure out what’s sticking on the boards right now. This is when you should reach out to Josh. This is when you should reach out to us and our and our teams over here at rabbit scale. Let’s figure out what the art of the possible is or where you’re trying to shoot to so that we can easily get you in there to speak to us and with the right people. Like I said before, we have a very, very robust AI practice here. We have 10 PhDs in the building. We are doing AI at an extremely high enterprise level. And when it comes to looking around the next corner, I believe that
As we know, there’s not a lot of AI experts out there right now. Therefore, a lot of the hiring that’s happening right now. Isn’t quite 10 AI people you’re having to lean on the experts that are already, you know, out here, you know, out in the field. So I would say to the people that are listening to the customers are listening to the partners that are listening.
Reach out and grab us. We want to we want to help. We want to show you what good looks like. We want to show you what Google’s been doing in the background. We want to show you all of these pieces and When we meet up with our customers, even quarterly, Josh, or even our month to month customers. We’re meeting with people for their their executive leadership meetings. And we’re going to be meeting with them quarterly to give them the updates on all the Google pieces that are coming down the pipe and for last year where I think a lot of partners were missing the boat is when big BigQuery slots came out. We have a lot of customers utilizing BigQuery, but we didn’t have a lot of people that modernized and utilize BigQuery slots to bring down that spend every month.
We don’t know that that’s coming down the pipe. This is what you should be tapping us for. We want to tell you where people are optimizing what the new technologies are that are that are front of mind for doesn’t matter your vertical. If you’re in finance, if you’re in health care, all of those pieces. And especially if we’re talking about health care, Google’s leading the way on those pieces for anybody that had to go out and get any type of, you know, shots for Moderna when we were working with Moderna to get things to market as quickly as possible. These are the pieces that you want to contact us for and we want to know what sort of data you have. We want to know we want to help you out with training those models, those data sets and leveraging your data. That’s what we want.
All right. So for the partners that are listening, they’re itching going, all right. I understand the products. I understand some of the differentiators. How in the world do I talk to my customers about this specifically and uncover some of these? So I’m a big probing questions, right? And so whether whether they’re sitting down with their customer at lunch, whether they’re sitting down with their customer at their own kind of QBR, just them and their customer or or whatever, whatever the engagement is, what what ways would you what are the questions that you would give those partners to ask of the customers to tee up if there’s an opportunity for us to all come in?
Love this. Well, I’m going to give everybody a little secret here, Josh.
If a company does not have active conversations with Google or a Google partner,
I’m going to say, at least for the last thousand that I’ve seen, I’m going to say 90 percent of the time, those people are the are the customers without discounts, without monthly discounts, without like their their boots dirty, knowing like what’s going on in the internals. So the first thing that any partner can lead with is, hey, have you ever been in contact with anybody at Google? Step one, have they talked to Google ever? If they have not, the first way that I lean into is getting people set up with their infrastructure discount. Most people are paying full price for their Google stack. They have not been able to reach out to Google. Google hasn’t reached out to them because maybe they don’t spend enough or maybe they’re maybe they’re multi cloud. Whatever the case may be, there are simple and easy ways to get a discount on their monthly bill. That’s the first thing I ask. Hey, have you ever talked to your Google sales, Google field sales rep or your Google engineer? If that’s a no, you can you can almost bet your bottom dollar that they’re paying full price for their infrastructure. And this is a great way to have an infrastructure discount conversation no matter who you are, whether it’s two percent, three percent. This gets that first piece that this gets you in the door to being able to a own that spend, right? A lot of people are direct to Google and they don’t know that they can work with partners and get an immediate discount. They don’t know that. A lot of people don’t know that they have instant access to Google Cloud Skills Boost. Josh, I get to give 30 licenses to every customer that spends with Google because Google Cloud Skills Boost comes with you when you’re using Google infrastructure of any kind. So another piece is if they have internal people that have not been upskilled or used any of the Google Cloud console at all, I shoot them right over to Google Cloud Skills Boost. I make them an admin and then I help them get their boots dirty and their internal people’s boots dirty by trying to figure out what’s but use Google Cloud Skills Boost. We have different we have different modules for AWS professionals, for Azure professionals. If it’s your first time in cloud, there’s so many different ways to utilize Google Cloud Skills Boost. But those first questions to get that conversation going is, hey, what’s your current discount on your Google Cloud infrastructure? Most times people don’t know and that’s a great way to get in. Let’s save you some money. Secondly, what in a perfect world would be great for you to have on Google in the next six to eight months? I always like to put a timeframe on anything that I’m talking about regarding product because you never know if this is something that a customer has been thinking about sitting on for the last four months. They just didn’t know what direction to go. That’s when you throw that at them. So, A, have you talked to Google? B,
who’s your admin? Big question. Who owns your Google spend inside of your business, Mr. and Mrs. Customer? Big piece there because sometimes that right hand isn’t even talking to the left. And in my last case, I can tell you that uncovered $30,000 in spend with a company that doesn’t go Google first. So they don’t spend half a million dollars in Google every month. They didn’t really care where that $32,000 was going every month. Lo and behold, since they don’t care, we got to take over that spend. We got to save you that 3% a month. We got to give you a Google engineer to kind of go through here, figure out what good looks like. And we made a little, we made a little map to figure out, “Hey, we’ll meet biweekly. You guys say you want this. Let’s put together a statement of work, a POC, and let’s utilize some of this Q4 budget to get you going.”
I love it. And I think for the partners, right? I look at that as if you can get in in that initial conversation to tee up to have some sort of kind of discovery about how we can help. That’s inevitably what we would expect to uncover, right? And I think the thought, if I’m the customer, and I hear that idea, the idea is if we can uncover that, imagine how much more we can help optimize, right? And then what that really turns into is that that product then is a paid consulting engagement or a paid SOW for some time-based work. I think what you guys would elicit to that customer is them realizing, “Wow, there is some incredibly deep, easy to work with expertise on this side.” And if they immediately found us cost savings, imagine what else they could find us. I’d love that angle.
Oh, absolutely. And I think just another piece here is, as we know, we’re all in tech. Identity and access management, you know, bad actors are usually the catalyst for a lot of things that happen internally with big businesses. I think touching on whether or not they’re properly utilizing their identity and access management, again, double clicking on who’s your current admin for your Google Cloud Console or even your AWS Console, any of your consoles. Who’s the admin? And have you guys done an IAM check to see, you know, any of the people that have left in the last 90 days? You’d be surprised, just like a lot of people are, of the large businesses that have 15 people that still have access to their Google Cloud Console. Yet we haven’t checked that out. And, you know, those are those holes we need to plug as soon as possible. And, you know, we’re in an election year right now. So I think a lot of people have already been looking out for their security and those those pieces, but it never gets old. And it’s it’s never bad to ask somebody about who’s who’s the admin was last time you’ve done an identity and access management suite. I like it.
All right. Final thoughts here. So Michael’s opinion, looking out to the future, I don’t think we can look out too much more than, you know, 12, 24 months. But if we look out that far,
what are the innovations that you’re most looking forward to in this market or just innovation overall?
You know, I think anybody could say, you know, AI is super, super cool and it’s innovative. I am I’m excited to see how people continually utilize AI, because I’ve seen as far as, you know, I come from working a lot with the architects and the engineers, how people can go quickly to coding and to have an app built and to quickly troubleshoot based on AI and the use use cases there. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing. But if I’m more excited about anything and working for, again, a partner, it’s about the optimization here, Josh. There’s so much money we can save businesses across the board. You want to talk about where people think us the most or thank me for my expertise the most. It’s saving them money and saving them time. That is it. We are here to save people time and money. So I think the optimization that Google is leaning into with other companies, like I said, Cast AI and the people that are needing to needing to go in even deeper, right? Optimizing Google clouds, one thing optimizing your Kubernetes workloads across three clouds all at the same time, another conversation. So I’m really excited about about the optimization pieces that are coming down the coming down the pipe, especially with Kubernetes and containerized workloads. I think that’s the most exciting piece. Save that money reinvested somewhere else.
I love it. I love it. I love that we’re still talking about. I mean, there’s so much innovation that happens, but there’s still so much money to be saved. It’s really what this industry was founded on years and years ago. Now we just have 800 more products and a ton more suppliers to be able to do it with. And with great complexity, people continue, partners continue to add tons and tons and tons of value. So I don’t know how these these customers are ever trying to do this on their own. I could not imagine being a customer and trying to figure this out myself.
Well, I’ll tell you what, well, we’re here to make things nice and easy for for everybody over your customers, our partners and everything, Josh. So I’m just very, very grateful for for us getting to have this chat talk about some some GCP.
Love it, man. All right, Michael, that’s it, buddy. Thanks so much for coming on. Lots of good nuggets in there. Really, really appreciate you and encourage everybody to reach out to you. I think you’re going to do some good in this channel.
We’re going to have some fun out here.
Definitely. Thanks for having me, Josh.
Awesome. All right, everybody. That wraps us up for this week. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering. This has been Michael Williams from Migration Domastery and dominating with Google Cloud with RapidScale. Until next time.