When I started the Ultimate Guide to Partnering, I set as my objective to "inform the partner ecosystem" on how to best engage with the technology giants. My first series of episodes emphasized my roots and experience at Microsoft. My goal has been to expand and explore the partner strategies of the other technology giants, how they view their partner ecosystems and what they seek from and what makes great partnerships.

In this episode I interview a partner leader at one of the other technology giants, another "hyperscaler". For those not deep in the technology sector, a "hyperscaler" is one of only a few companies in technology capable of making the significant investments in cloud infrastructure, geographically dispersed data centers, network infrastructure, etc. Only a few companies are capable of these investments at scale and the most notable are: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Definition from Wikipedia - In computing, hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system. This typically involves the ability to seamlessly provision and add compute, memory, networking, and storage resources to a given node or set of nodes that make up a larger computing, distributed computing, or grid computing environment. Hyperscale computing is necessary in order to build a robust and scalable cloud, big data, map reduce, or distributed storage system and is often associated with the infrastructure required to run large distributed sites such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.

This interview is focused on Google and I was joined by Eric Rosenkranz, Google's Cloud Platform Service Partner Lead for North America. Eric was also a former colleague of mine when we both worked for Microsoft.

In this interview Eric tells his story, share his impression of Google's unique value and his view of partnerships and teams. It's an excellent view for any channel partner who works with more than one of the technology giants, or just wants to broaden their perspective on the industry.

On his focus...

* His role - leads the North American team focused on regional and national system integrators, partners doing IT outsourcing and traditional resellers looking to enrich their offering. He is building the partner ecosystem geographically and across vertical and industry solutions.

* His focus - services partners that build repeatable IP and innovate or leverage the advanced capabilities Google offers - such as machine learning.

* Perspective on competition - the experience and early bets AWS made have led to dramatic success and public cloud adoption. Microsoft has had big success across many cloud offerings and geographies.

* Why Google? - the quality of talent and engineering at Google, delivering things like its search engine and adjacent technologies. Google is solving for the big computer science problems around machine learning, containers, self-driving cars, language translation, etc. Google is also a huge contributor to "open source". Eric references Googles contributions to Tensor Flow, an open-source software library for Machine Intelligence.

* What is Google doing now? - Google has increased the number of offerings and increased its geographical coverage to support the market.