154 – Twenty-Seven-Minute MASTERCLASS on Achieving Your Greatest Results with Google

A Twenty-Seven Minute Primer from a Top Google Leader

This special condensed episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering® highlights some of the best nuggets from my interview with Darren Mowry, a top Google Sales Leader investing in partners to fuel hyper-growth. Darren has held leadership roles at all three hyper scalers and joins to help us better differentiate his organization’s approach and why partners of all types and SaaS vendors should invest in building partnerships with Google. This is a special Twenty-Seven-Minute MASTERCLASS on Achieving Your Greatest Results with Google.

In Darren’s words

Darren is a 25-year high-tech industry veteran with a career that started in systems and management consulting and has led him to cloud computing.  He held multiple leadership roles at Microsoft for ten years and joined AWS in the early days of the cloud, where he spent ten years in the US and Europe launching new businesses and leading large functions and geographies for the company.  Darren now leads Google Cloud’s Corporate Segment in North America, where he is responsible for the company’s growing businesses focused on regional enterprises and startups/digital natives.

What You’ll Learn

  • His career journey and mission at Google (2:18)
  • Thomas Kurian’s Investment in Partners (6:36)
  • Question from our listeners, featuring Anne Wheatley (8:21)
  • A unique perspective as a Microsoft, AWS, and now Google leader (12:15)
  • Why Google? (18:44)
  • Ecosystem advice (23:12)
  • Optimize for Success with Google (25:21)

I hope you enjoy and learn from this amazing business leader as much as I enjoyed welcoming him to Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

Quote From This Episode

“How do we make sure that we’re identifying and doubling down on the organizations that we think are going to have the most significant growth, what’s important is that we’ve embedded partners in all of the aspects of this motion. And all of my experience working with you and other partner leaders over time proves to me that you have to feed a partnership, especially early on, you really have to fuel that partnership so that over time, you can have the kind of trust-based relationship and joint success models that are important for both organizations.

Other Recent Episodes Featuring Google

140 – One Google Executive Applies 10X Mindset to Improve Healthcare Outcomes with Andria McGonigle

126 – Hyper-Focus as a Growth Imperative to High-Performance Partnering with Tony Safoian of SADA.

107 – One Leader’s Focus, Taking Partnerships to the Next Level at Google.

97 – Focused Growth Investments, Google Premier Partners SADA’S Pioneering Alliance Program.

64 – Twenty Years, Leadership in Big and Meaningful Ways, with Tony Safoian, CEO of SADA.

Our Sponsors

Resources

We are so excited to welcome Athletic Greens as our latest sponsor. My daily ritual has included a “green drink” supplement for over 20 years ago. AG1 is packed with 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. If you’d like to join me, give AG1 a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one-year supply of Vitamin D and Five Travel Packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athleticgreens.com/vincem

PartnerTap is the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine.

Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partners, customers, business, google, partnering, organizations, cloud, market, partnerships, outcomes, microsoft, opportunity, partner ecosystem, companies, darren, frankly, aws, important, digital native, spend

SPEAKERS

Darren Mowry, Announcer, Vince Menzione

Vince Menzione  00:00

For this week on Ultimate Guide to partnering, we’re taking a fan favorite episode with Darren Maori of Google and condensing it down to 27 minutes with Darren, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you.

Darren Mowry  00:15

How do we make sure that we’re identifying and doubling down on the organizations that we think are going to have the most significant growth, what’s important is that we’ve embedded partners in all of the aspects of this motion. And all of my experience working with you and other partner leaders over time, proves to me that you have to feed a partnership, especially early on, you really have to fuel that partnerships so that over time, you can have the kind of trust based relationship and joint success models that are important for both organizations.

Vince Menzione  00:45

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right, optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. A top Google sales leader investing in partnerships to fuel the growth. This decade of the ecosystem is marked by rapid growth and acceleration of digital natives. Experts expect us to reach over 1 million SaaS based solutions. By the end of the decade. My friend Darren Maori, who has held leadership roles at all three hyperscalers joins us on Ultimate Guide to partnering to help us better differentiate his organization’s approach, and why partners of all types and SAS vendors should invest in building partnerships with Google. I hope you enjoy this episode. As much as I enjoyed welcoming Darren marry. Dan, Darren, welcome to the podcast.

Darren Mowry  01:52

Hey, great to be here events. I gotta tell you, I have listened to these over the months and years and a ton of people that I know that you and I have worked with. And I’m so flattered to be able to spend some time with you. So thanks for having me.

Vince Menzione  02:02

Well, I am so excited to finally welcome you to ultimate guide to partnering. You are Google sales leader, former Amazon leader who played a pivotal role in that organization’s rise. And we met back at Microsoft. So really excited to welcome you today.

Darren Mowry  02:17

Yeah, thanks so much.

Vince Menzione  02:18

So for our listeners that may not know you. Can you tell us more about Darren

Darren Mowry  02:23

Ben. So I’ve spent last 25 years and Ouch, that hurts me to say that number. But 25 years or so, in the high tech space, I started my career in the Washington DC area. In the large scale systems implementation and consulting world, I joined the Microsoft partner ecosystem back in the internet boom. And that company went through a process of being sold to Dell professional services, which gave me this leap into Microsoft and my first role over in the pure software world. So those early days to me were super special, we were on a mission to really change the way the world thought about technology. And I spent about 10 years at Microsoft in various roles all within the enterprise business, before taking on a really special role, frankly, at this e commerce book selling company that wanted to do something crazy from a cloud computing perspective. And obviously, that was Amazon Web Services, or AWS. And I had a wonderful 10 year journey at AWS, where I started in North America, I then had an incredible opportunity to move to Europe, where I spent a number of years opening and leading some new markets, I led business development for Europe, Middle East and Africa. And I ran some of the largest businesses outside of the US. And now I find myself hitting my six month anniversary at Google.

Vince Menzione  03:37

Wow, wow. So first of all, I remember those days at Microsoft. And then certainly I got to watch the 10 years we kept in very close contact during that period of time, I got to see all your social posts and your amazing family and your adventures around the world and watching the meteoric rise of AWS during that time. And now six months, six months went by fast didn’t I remember, we reached out just when it happened. So national sales role at Google responsible for the commercial business. Can you share with us the why, what and the outcomes you hope to achieve in this role?

Darren Mowry  04:10

So I’m leading what we’re calling the corporate segment for North America. So the United States and Canada and this business for Google Cloud is made up of two customer cohorts essentially, on one hand, we have the digital natives and the startup business, an area that I absolutely love to be a part of, because these companies as they’re fast moving their founder and engineering lead, they’re very, very forward leaning when it comes to advanced technology. And these companies have flipped the economics of tech, right. And the cloud has created this incredible flipping mechanism that allows us to see 100 person gaming companies, generating hundreds of millions of dollars of consumption and spend Gone are the days where you can only make a coverage and a strategy decision based on the size of your customer. You’ve got to think a little bit more intelligently and that digital native and startups Bass is a really, really special part of my business. The other side is what we call our regional enterprise business. So consider that the middle market companies that are anywhere from a few 100 million in revenue to a couple of billion dollars in revenue, those companies have enterprise requirements, they have very, very hard business and technical challenges. And yet, many of the cloud platforms themselves have kind of skipped over that market. And yet, when I’ve done some research on that market potential, the mid market in North America generates $12 trillion into the GDP annually, there’s 42 million employees in the mid market in North America. And, in fact, if we could put our arms around the middle market, you would find that it would be the sixth largest economy on Earth. And so the opportunity in the enterprise space, that regional enterprise space can be underscored. It’s critically important and super exciting as well. But you

Vince Menzione  05:51

touch on two really important points here. First of all, I’ll call it the SAS economy. And there’s about 185,000, SAS software companies, they fall into that one category you’re talking about, like Netflix wasn’t managed by Microsoft, let’s get that on the table here. I mean, the huge opportunity, the next Netflix is going to drive a specific transformation that we haven’t even recognized yet.

Darren Mowry  06:13

Exactly. No. I mean, Vince, when I’ve read some articles, as I’m sure you have that says that at least 65% of the Fortune 500 didn’t exist 10 years ago. So if you put that in the context of where we are now, my mission back to what you said on that digital native side, my mission and my team’s mission, is to find the next fortune 500. And what a pretty incredible opportunity. That is.

Vince Menzione  06:36

Absolutely. I love the focus on the mid market, because those are also the organizations that have the highest level and propensity to grow. Exactly right. This podcast focuses in on partnering Ultimate Guide to partnering and in fact, is the top rated podcast and your leader Thomas Kurian, has made significant investments in partner led sales growth. And in fact, Thomas came out and committed to 100% partner attach to Google’s b2b deals. It’s a big deal. What can you tell us about Thomas’s commitment and the company’s investment in partners?

Darren Mowry  07:09

Yeah, well, first of all events, I want to just congratulate you on what you’ve built here, the approach that you bring to this, it’s the person you’ve always been at Microsoft, and through the journey through now the the focus you’ve had on partners and on understanding that this is all about shared outcomes comes out loud and clear in the work that you’re doing. I know, a bunch of us get a lot of value from that. And in terms of your question, that’s a great one, Thomas and our entire leadership team has made the decision that the path ahead is with partners period, we’re not going to build a competing professional services org and in our experience, that can create confusion for our partners and for our customers. And we believe that we’re at this really interesting point where we want to be known as creating amazing technology. And we want need our partners to bring this big scale this broad reach industry and technical specialization that our customers are demanding from us every single day. So this isn’t just an idea, this wasn’t just a headline for Thomistic. And out in the press, as someone that’s running a complete partner driven and partner led business. We’re deploying programs and systems and even compensation models that make this real for the folks that show up every day and meet with our customers, as well as for our partners. But I can say is there’s wood behind that era events in a big way.

Vince Menzione  08:21

Well, and compensation is where the rubber meets the road, right? It drives the behavior we hope to see in this economy in this digital world that we work in. So we went out this past week, and I polled our listeners as to what they’d like to know from today’s interview. And one of our listeners came back and we leave from crayon, a top Microsoft and Google partner said, as we’re driving our go to market and doing the heavy lifting to bring deals to Google, in this new plan, does it encourage the field sellers to qualify leads and share them in reverse? In other words, share them back to the partners, and what expectations should Google’s partners have about their field sellers about Google’s field sellers, driving qualified opportunities, and cosell along with the partner?

Darren Mowry  09:16

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I know it’s the panacea of partnering. What I’ll tell you is that the structures, the compensation and the motions really matter. And so in my business in North America, we’re going through this prioritization exercise where we’re using internal and external metrics to assess of the 1000s and 1000s of organizations that are within our business. How do we make sure that we’re identifying and doubling down on the organizations that we think are going to have the most significant growth? What’s important is that we’ve embedded partners in all of the aspects of this motion. We’re not just saying that the quote, tier three is going to be where we engage partners. That’s no way to build a partner ecosystem. And all of my experience working with you and other partner leaders over time proves To me that you have to feed a partnership, especially early on, you really have to fuel that partnership so that over time, you can have the kind of trust based relationship and joint success models that are important for both organizations. And so what we’re doing is, as I said, structuring the way partners engage with our highest, most successful highest potential customers, what is our joint selling opportunity, where, frankly, neither of us are incumbents time? What are we going to do around joint marketing and joint persona marketing? And then also, as I said, How do we lean in and provide investment, not only from a marketing perspective, but I’m providing significant amounts of investment, millions of dollars of investment, in fact, directly into partners to go experiment with customers build proofs of concepts and essentially offset the cost of the partner that they need to operate and grow. But to also not pass that on to the customer that I’m trying to win at the beginning as well. So that combined with some interesting compensation models that we’ve introduced in my business this year, that are very much about new logo acquisition, and market share gains, really allows us to, I think be uniquely positioned,

Vince Menzione  11:08

it is very striking to see the level of investments in terms of resources, the millions of dollars, you quote here in terms of investment dollars to help organizations help partners grow the business with Google. And then did you say 10s? of 1000s of opportunities? How are you tracking all of that?

Darren Mowry  11:25

Yeah, absolutely. So my business in North America is that codenamed account business, right? So we haven’t we’ve ringfence where we believe the opportunity is for the year. And that alone is over 8000 organizations, man. So if you think of no matter how large and how quick, I try to hire, it’s just a necessity, frankly, right in the sense that partners will and absolutely are key to helping me reach all of those customers. And as I said, not just reach, but provide relevant outcome based engagements and customers. I think that is sometimes the overlooked perspective, when I think about partnerships that we very quickly go to partners and say, hey, help us go talk to customers that we either don’t have time, or we don’t have resources to go to. And while that is interesting and important to the partnership, what’s really fascinating for me is the depth of experience specialization and expertise that these partners bring to us.

Vince Menzione  12:15

It’s striking to see the investments. But I want to shift a little bit here, because as I said earlier, you have a unique perspective, several years, 10 years as a leader of Microsoft 10 years on that rocket ship. And you were there at the early days, when AWS was investing, you were one of the early leaders in that organization, and now over to Google. And so you’ve gotten to see that across these three hyperscalers. Is it fair to ask you to compare and contrast the three? It’s fair?

Darren Mowry  12:47

I’ll tell you events that you can imagine that it’s a question I get asked very, very often from partners, but also from customers, right that I go in, they see my LinkedIn profile. And it’s something that I’m asked very, very, very often, especially as you said, after spending 20 plus years, at kind of the three major cloud platforms, I’ll tell you, I really don’t spend a lot of brain cells comparing what we’re doing here at Google, to what I experienced at AWS and Microsoft I, I do have some observations that are based on what I’m hearing from customers and what the markets telling me, and I absolutely will share those with you. The first thing that I’m finding is the market opportunity for cloud Azure is so much larger than what we’re all realizing at the moment, whether it be these industry analysts or financial analysts, the estimates for just public cloud for this year alone, of the total available market, north of $750 billion, with a beat right reaching a trillion dollars in the course of a single year. So while many folks want to compare the revenue of the three of us, Google, Microsoft, and AWS, I’ll tell you that I and my leadership team are staying focused on getting as big as we can as fast as we can, and really servicing customers. And we want to be a very, very large company over time. And we’re on the trajectory to do just that. Secondly, I will tell you that customers are leaning in with us because we’re taking a very kind of different approach to what we believe is this next wave of cloud computing. And I’ll share with you a few of these points vents that one of these pillars for us is data. Google, as you’re probably not surprised, brings a tremendous amount of heritage and expertise around data. And so this concept of the data cloud that we’re bringing to our customers to help drive large scale analytics, very, very complex data based workloads, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, is a very different and unique value proposition in the cloud space at the moment. And that data cloud for Google is a huge, huge investment area for us. Another pillar of our mission is around open cloud. And so when you think of what open means, it doesn’t just mean that Google is investing millions and millions of lines of code into the open source community. We’re very active in that developer ecosystem and what we find is, rather than having a very kind of close was off blackbox product development process, we want to share what we’re learning. And we want to gain value from the incredible amount of innovation happening outside of our walls. So this open cloud, not only with open source, but the concept of being hybrid and multi cloud is a very unique value proposition for us when compared to some of the other hyperscalers. Our third piece, which you’re very familiar with is our collaboration aspect. So the collaboration cloud from Google started years ago with Gmail, and grew into G Suite has evolved into what we call workspace now. And the workspace for us is this multifaceted, very sophisticated set of collaboration tools that are very much at the heart of the future of work, we’ve just come through this very, very challenging period. And frankly, I think we still have some challenges to go and some evolution around what work will look like in the future. And the fact that Google and Google Cloud is so well positioned with a cloud based collaboration stack is I think, again, a unique differentiator. And then lastly, and you would expect me to say this, Vince is just the trusted cloud. So the concept of we absolutely must have security as jobs zero priority zero, as we say, the concept of having a zero trust model ensures that the products that we build, meet our customers security requirements, but also the amount of work we’re doing with partners with customers to ensure that the final applications and workloads are secure, are absolutely critical as well. Last thing that I share, when I think about my own observation is I’m really humbled, frankly, by what I’m seeing is the humanity that we at Google, are seeking to inject back into the cloud. And so many people believe that hyper growth and massive scale means kind of removing the uniqueness of the customer and the employee at times from the growth equation. So we’re trying to make everyone look and act the same, because when they look and act the same, you can drive scale, what we’re finding is we can invest and we can engage with people, whether it be customers, partners and our employees in a way that’s very unique and bespoke to what those customers need, what those partners need, and to what our employees need. And so I’m constantly reminding myself that it’s actually the people power aspect of Google, that’s going to allow us to continue to grow and I think be a big player in this space,

Vince Menzione  17:17

you did cover quite a bit of ground, I just want to reflect on this for a moment. So the pie is getting bigger, this transformation has impacted things like we never expected to see in these last two years, right? This wasn’t just the lift and shift of existing applications, right, we talked about the 185,000, SAS software companies going to a million by the end of the decade. And so everything in our lives is are changing. To your point, you talked about data. And it reminded me of a conversation with Eric Rosencrantz, on Google’s differentiation on the engineering side. And it is striking, then we can just go on and on and on about some of the engineering prowess within the organization that now reflects back into this enterprise world that you talked about open cloud hybrid, certainly an area it makes a lot of sense. We are at or genius society, whatever genius enterprise world and everyone has a play in this world to having that is amazing. The collaboration aspects to I come back to the fact that I think one of the things that anchors Microsoft into accounts has been the collaboration play, and there really hasn’t been a contender over the years up until what was called G Suite. Now is workspace right, that platform will continue. If we look at the millennial generation, many of them are much more comfortable in that world. And I can’t wait to see what’s gonna happen in 10 to 15 years, I think there’s going to be a shift there completely with you. So I’m a partner, what would you say you you mentioned the differentiation. But what about the approaches to partnering between the three?

Darren Mowry  18:44

Yeah, so my mission here at Google is to make the best cloud platform for partners and customers, frankly, events. That’s my personal mission, the mission of my team. And we’re building this partner ecosystem where our success is literally built on the success of our partners. And so one thing I would call out loud and clear, again, is this business that I’m running in North America is built with partners when I the percentage that I can’t share with you openly, but I’ll say it’s a very, very high significant percentage of my business that either comes through partners or is influenced by partners. But it’s really proof to show that we’re not trying to build a direct model, where we triple partners in we’re trying to build a partner enabled partner led growth machine in the cloud. And from what I can tell, and from my own experience that is very unique, and very different to put partners in such a core growth element of who we’re going to become.

Vince Menzione  19:35

It’s a huge area of differentiation. And I think the investments that are very striking coming out of the Google organization will say that so you’ve been around these partners for your entire career. What attributes have you seen from the best of the best? Yeah, it’s

Darren Mowry  19:49

a great something that I’ve thought about often and there’s a few things that jumped to mind for me. So one is an open and frank relationship meaning sharing good and bad feedback in both directions is really, really critical. I can’t stress enough that we’re building over here, we’re on a journey at Google Cloud, we’re far from being who we’re going to be when we grow up. And so the corrective and developmental feedback that I’m getting from the partner ecosystem is literally helping me pivot, the strategy of this business write completely take left or right turn so that open communication is key. I’ve mentioned that this concept of being experienced and focused. So really selecting the things that you do well, and being the best at those things, versus trying to show up and being too many things to too many people I think, is a common trap. And something that I think, continues to prove true in the cloud. I really enjoy partnerships that are diligent and fact based. And so as I’m finding some of the partners that I’m building relationships with, now, that may be a little different, frankly, maybe a little different, and even in Google Cloud, but I like to use data. And I like to use information to draw insights to make better decisions jointly. And so I tend to spend a lot of my time digging into the mechanics and the triggers and the signals in my business. And I’m finding that that’s helpful in a very powerful way with partners. And then last but not least, is balancing inputs and outputs. Right. And this is, I think, a partnership pillar, also just a good growth in sales pillar in the sense that you can’t just focus on the revenue at the end of the day, the revenue is an outcome of all the good work that you’ve done to get to that point. So I love partnering with organizations that want to start at the very beginning of that customer buying journey. And we want to think about what are those critical steps along the way? And how do we both play important roles in all those inputs? It’s this concept of you can manage inputs, but you can measure outputs. And it’s important that we don’t get those two things confused.

Vince Menzione  21:43

I love what you have to say here. I’m going to repeat back to you because I think it ties into some of the principles that I talked about, first of all this corrective and developmental feedback, often, partners just aren’t open in their communication, I say it not being aggressive enough in their communication, like they just sometimes it’s just the status quo. It’s the happy talk, we never really get down to the conversations I apply OKRs to what I do, and I believe applying an approach that says how do we get to green? How do we get to the objectives that we have agreed to, and we’re measuring against that you mentioned the data factor of that as well. And then the focused approach, right, I’m gonna go back to OKRs here a little bit, because we need to stay focus, we can’t boil the ocean, we have to pick the one or two or three things that we can do together, that are had the highest impact. And you mentioned balancing inputs and outputs, which to me comes back to what is it? What is the area that we are going to focus on? And we are co coming together as two organizations? What’s that better together look like? Oh, there’s quite a bit of talk about ecosystem. It’s striking. We’ve talked about some of these SAS software companies, some of them still have a direct sales model. And they’re trying to figure out how to partner with organizations like Google. And I’ve seen this firsthand. So what advice would you give to partner organizations about the investments they need to make in their organizations, these are a lot of the this is that client base, you talk you’re talking about here, right? These digital native organizations, what investments that they didn’t need to make to fuel the growth,

Darren Mowry  23:12

the days have passed, where we can bring one service or value prop to the market and think we can thrive in splendid isolation. The cloud market requires that there’s this very unique coexistence, where we find these best outcomes for partners. And sometimes those best outcomes for partners and customers come by partnering with a competitor, right, it actually comes by identifying solutions and companies that can not only fill the stress, cracks and fractures that you may have in your own business, but really augment and turn up the volume of the power of whatever solution you’re bringing to the market. And I find there’s this massive opportunity for partners with the right scale and breadth to be an ecosystem in and of themselves really be an even greater part of an even bigger ecosystem. Some of our partners are creating these multiple disciplines within their own businesses to be able to resell the cloud, they’re able to provide support and manage services on the platform. They’re able to innovate and deliver new products and new outcomes for customers. And they’re even able to inject ISV solutions when it makes sense. And so they’re almost creating their own ecosystem within their own boundaries, and then plugging themselves into an even broader ecosystem. And what I think is really wonderful about the market climate that we’re in at the moment is that those partners who maybe don’t yet have that size or desire to operate in the way of creating their own ecosystem, well, you can choose to be great at a few things and fit into a very tight ecosystem of partners that are seeking to deliver all of these great outcomes. And in my opinion partners that are focused on being flexible, ever changing and really realizing that they’re a part of a broader ecosystem. Those partners are going to prove to be very, very powerful, and that different differentiations going to absolutely show up for customers.

Vince Menzione  24:56

You are speaking my language because I speak about seven principles of successful partnering, the last of which is agility. And you just you just nailed that right there. Not exactly is it? It is organizations need to be agile, especially during this time. We know some successful partners, both of us that know how to apply agility to their businesses and pivoting when they need to, and understanding what the opportunity areas are intuitively knowing where the markets are going to go, or at least having a listening mechanism within their own organizations so that they’re paying attention to these, these feedbacks. So Darren, you have been an amazing guests. I just love reconnecting with you. But for our listeners, most of them are partners. Most of them are people in our ecosystem, a lot of people that you and I both know, any closing words of advice on optimizing their success working with Google?

Darren Mowry  25:51

Absolutely, then here’s what I would leave the listeners with. If I were to give some guidance. One focus really matters, right? There’s lots of opportunities. And frankly, there’s lots of potential roadblocks and stumbling blocks around being distracted or dazzled by the next shiny thing. And while I do think we need to look around corners and anticipate what’s coming, focus and delivery and excellence today is really important. Secondly, mindshare, there’s more and more growth and more and more opportunities in the partner ecosystem around Google. And it’s really important that we as Google Cloud lean in and get mindshare and awareness as to what our partners are doing. But also, frankly, we need to make it easier for our partners to get the mindshare of our sellers. And I personally am committed to that as as our partner organization that mindshare really matters. You want to be the partner that people know and trust, and they know you stand for something. And so mindshare is critical. And then lastly, events, I would ask that all of our partners think past the transaction, and really focus on customer outcomes, as we talked about, and you mentioned with the software as a service trends, the cloud is not perpetual software anymore, right? Where you can add software to an agreement and just hope that a customer uses it over time, we have to re win these customers every 24 hours. And that means that we have to always be focused on outcomes and the value that our customers are getting from the technology. And that means think past the purchase. And think about this ongoing stream of outcomes and workloads. That’s the way we have to show up for our customers. And there’s no way we can do that without our partners.

Vince Menzione  27:24

Such great advice, Darren, and it has been an absolute blast. I’m so happy to have you here today and wish you amazing success in this role.

Darren Mowry  27:33

Thank you.