Google wants Aussie enterprise business to go via channel

Google's regional enterprise boss has told CRN that the Australian channel is crucial to its growth ambitions.

Doug Farber, Asia-Pacific managing director of Google Enterprise, said: "Google as an organisation is all about scale and providing a great user experience. We considered selling directly but we recognised that the channel has great expertise and reach to go places we couldn't go and could give Australian businesses great service and support.

"We'd love to see the vast proportion of our business go through the channel."

Farber said that Google was "building up this reseller channel rapidly and it is quickly becoming a robust ecosystem".

He pointed to the deal with giant integrator UXC Connect as a symbol that Google was "expanding the channel ecosystem".

Farber also nodded to the likes of Woolworths, Fairfax and Flight Centre as examples of its blue-chip enterprise partners in Australia.

Google's enterprise products are famously low-priced – a Google Apps licence costs $5 per user per month, while Chromebooks start as low as $329.

[Related: UXC Connect partners with Google]

Resellers and integrators have complained to CRN that it is difficult to generate sufficient margins out of such low-priced products.

Farber responded by saying: "Cloud resellers understand the future of IT is in the cloud. The legacy software market they relied on is in decline."

He said cloud integrators were "weaning themselves" off chunky deals and instead "adding a pipeline of annuity revenues".

"That is the future. They recognise that the gravy train in the enterprise is changing. The cloud is inevitable. They go to conferences the world over and hear about the inevitability of the consumerisation of IT, the inevitability of the cloud."

Farber said Google was establishing more channel programs. "We have a tiered partner program, we do MDF, we try to do attractive incentives to get people to come onboard. We do co-marketing to help people leverage the brand.

"We also don’t have a services arm – a lot of vendors have a service business that are profit centres. That causes conflict. We are happy to let our resellers and integrators take that business," he added.

Farber would not break out details on Google's Australian channel footprint, but said the company now has about 6,000 resellers worldwide.

"Fifty eight percent of the Fortune 500 are using a paid enterprise cloud product from Google."