Zencore and Google Cloud - March 2022 Newsletter

Hello - This is the March installment of our monthly newsletter.

To quickly recap our mission, we are X-Googlers that created Zencore specifically to address a gap in the partner ecosystem that we experienced first hand. We are an engineering driven organization with a laser focus on helping Google acquire, implement and successfully grow customers on Cloud.

We are the first Google Cloud Native Partner.

2022 Off to a Quick Start

Google continues to gain traction in the market and in some ways it appears that AWS is making that job easier. We continue to acquire customers that are leaving AWS due to competitive concerns with Amazon. When your cloud provider lives by the motto of ‘your margin is my opportunity’, paying them millions of dollars in cloud fees may no longer seem like a great idea.

We have seen this play out in the retail space and to some degree in the technology/software vertical, but Amazon’s ambition seems to be straying well beyond those areas. It’s an opportunity for Google to be aggressive in courting customers that suddenly find themselves in a competitive situation with their cloud vendor.

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Back to the Office

For those of us that worked at Google Cloud pre-covid, empty offices would have been a blessing. Sometimes finding a conference room to take a call was the hardest part of your day.

Like many companies, Google will slowly start transitioning back to the office in April. Each region will have different rules for the transition, but it’s clear that there is an expectation that employees will be in the office part time.

Next week Zencore will have its first meeting at a customer’s office since the start of Covid. This transition feels strange, but for most of us it’s a positive change and puts us on a path back to feeling normal.

Let’s Meet

Zencore Programs

During the early days of Google Cloud, there was a program called SCE (pronounced “SKI”). It was short for Strategic Cloud Engineer and the intent was to give customers access to a dedicated deeply technical resource. The limitation with the program was that the SCE could not be onboarded to the customer’s systems or do hands-on work.

We at Zencore have resurfaced this amazing program, with one major difference. A Zencore SCE is always onboarded to our customers' environments and their main focus is doing hands-on work.

Our customers love the ability to have access to an engineer with specialized knowledge that they can use on an hourly, weekly or monthly basis. The SCE has been very successful when embedding in organizations that have a backlog of technical debt that they wish to unblock. (everyone nodding in unison regarding the existence of tech debt backlog).

Please reach out to sales@zencore.dev for more information.

Customer Solution Spotlight

Healthcare and Life Sciences, Energy, Semiconductors are all great verticals for Zencore and Google Cloud. One of the use cases that cloud environments address in those industries is the need for a significant amount of compute resources for short periods of time and the ability to use Preemptible (now Spot) Virtual Machines (PVMs/Spot VMs).

We are seeing patterns in our customers’ solutions around the usage of GKE for large scaled-out HPC clusters to either run simulations, large computational jobs, or train machine learning models at very large scale. For example, one of our top customers uses very large scale GKE clusters to advance drug discovery using machine learning. They are to this date one of the top 10 PVMs GKE customers for Google Cloud in scale. Another one of our customers relies on GKE autoscaling to manage access and capacity of NVIDIA A100 GPUs for large jobs including energy distribution and weather forecast data.

Combining Cloud’s resource elasticity, CPU/GPU capacity and GKE “auto-features” for scaling and operations provides a great framework for those workloads. We expect to see continued traction around those solutions and are closely following the progress in the K8S communities around batch processing, GKE for HPC workloads and some add-ons/features coming up directly from Google Cloud as well.

Please reach out to sales@zencore.dev if you would like more information about those solutions or a review of what is possible on Google Cloud for these use cases.

Employee Spotlight

Christian Tanev - Strategic Sales

Christian joined Zencore from the Google Cloud sales team in Los Angeles. He was an enterprise consulting engineer and a consultant with Google partner Accenture prior to that. Christian is a big Ohio State fan (his alma mater) and recently learned how to ski. He also has a passion for a perfectly cooked steak and RompHims.

Christian had a blockbuster quarter, far exceeding his quota in terms of revenue and new customer acquisition.

Zencore curated Google Cloud updates