Google LLC today announced it’s launching a new center of excellence for independent software vendors to help them take better advantage of its cloud services.

ISVs are coming under increasing pressure from their customers, who aren’t satisfied with simply running their applications in the cloud. While the cloud offers big benefits such as lower costs and increased availability of applications, customers are looking for more, Google said: They want to unlock greater value from their data through technologies such as analytics and artificial intelligence, and they want to take advantage of the technology ecosystems enabled by the cloud.

ISVs are eyeing similar benefits from the cloud too. They’re increasingly looking to reshape their applications by adopting more agile, multicloud architectures in order to make them more portable, and they’re looking to transform their business models too.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Siddhartha Agarwal, managing director of strategic SaaS partnerships for Google Cloud, said the new ISV/SaaS Center of Excellence or CoE is intended to help ISVs accelerate their cloud transformation journeys.

“ISVs’ customers are saying I don’t necessarily want the software delivered on-prem,” Agarwal said. “And companies that already have their applications in the cloud want them to be faster and more convenient.”

The new CoE is a resource that will engage with ISVs to help them take better advantage of the array of cloud services Google offers, in order to expand the capabilities of their applications, Agarwal said. And for those ISVs that are just beginning their cloud journeys, the CoE will help them do that by adopting new technologies such as software containers and open source, rewriting their applications and delivering them as a software-as-a-service, for example.

ISVs that sign up for the CoE will be able to engage with Google’s experts in areas such as sales engineering, solutions architects and so on. So, for example, an ISV that sells software to merchants would be able to learn how to tap into various Google Cloud services to enable that, Agarwal explained.

“ISVs have built their software over a period of time, but they realize they could leverage DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering expertise from Google that we learned” from implementing Gmail and other Google services, Agarwal said. “We’re helping them leverage the broader Google product areas. So we’re moving significantly up the stack to provide more capabilities Google has.”

Agarwal said Google is targeting three distinct categories of ISVs, including those focused on vertical industries such as Temenos AG in banking software, horizontal providers such as OpenText Corp. and Splunk Inc., and SaaS companies that are “born in the cloud,” such as Salesforce.com Inc. In particular, ISVs can tap into broader Google services such as Shopping, Maps, Pay, Ads, Android and Chrome.

OpenText, for instance, used Google as the preferred partner for its Digital Experience Platform customer experience management deployments. Its customers can blend their own data with data sources such as Google Analytics 360, Ads and YouTube.

“The idea is to create a more portable engagement for ISVs,” Agarwal said. “For SaaS providers in particular, the plan is to provide a better ability to deliver on-premises that customers may require.”

Much of the cloud transformation work for ISVs will leverage Google’s Anthos platform, Agarwal said. Google Anthos is a hybrid cloud application development platform that runs atop the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration software. It’s designed to host applications that can run unmodified on both existing on-premises hardware and public clouds, giving companies the option to choose the most suitable infrastructure for each one.

With Anthos, applications are typically deployed in software containers, which are used to host the individual components of each app and make them easier to work with. The main benefit is that developers get to use a single set of tools to build and deploy their apps, and push through updates as necessary, no matter what infrastructure those apps are hosted on.

Temenos used Anthos to transform its suite of banking software so it can be delivered via Google’s own cloud environment, and also other clouds, via a SaaS model.

“There has been explosive growth of cloud adoption in the banking industry, and we are delighted to partner with Google Cloud to deliver our software as a service on Google Cloud, and across multiple cloud platforms with Anthos,” said Tony Coleman, a product director at Temenos Technology. “Working with the ISV/SaaS CoE has enabled us to move faster by gaining access to hands-on technical knowledge when we need it and providing access to expertise deep within Google.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Google