Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I compare Google’s ecosystem-first AI strategy with the hybrid deployment models of Microsoft and AWS.
Highlights
00:03 — A crazy new trend here in 2026 has been AI deployment, or agent deployment, agentic transformation. The connection is this remarkable technology that all these AI companies have been pumping out with the desired business goals that business leaders are demanding. You see a couple of different approaches emerging here.
00:26 — The five big AI companies leading the way on this are Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The only one of those that is going with an exclusively partner ecosystem-led approach for these AI deployments is Google Cloud. I think the big thing is it’s going 100% with its ecosystem partners for these AI deployments, for what Google Cloud calls agentic transformation.
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01:51 — President, Global Partner Ecosystem, Kevin Ichhpurani has been a very successful in his efforts. He’s also been a staunch supporter of this [approach], he says: “We’re a technology company. We’re really good at doing the technology, and we want to surround ourselves with force multiplying partners who are really good at the deployment. And Google Cloud will be connected with them in some ways.”
03:16 — Partner-driven revenue was up 80%. Bookings driven by partners were up 100%, so they doubled. And sales of partner-created solutions on the Google Cloud Marketplace were up 90%. As high-growth as Google Cloud was in 2025, they’re moving and growing, expanding at an even more blistering pace here in 2026.
04:36 — Google Cloud has said, “Hey, what we’ve been doing so far has been working really well. We’re going to double down on that with lots of training and incentives for our partners,” whereas AWS and Microsoft say, “You know what? We’re going to keep working with partners. In some ways, we need to build our own capabilities and expertise.”
