“We do delivery through our partners,” Google Public Sector’s Troy Bertram tells CRN.

The public sector holds a “significant opportunity” for Google partners, with a variety of organizations from research firms to state agencies to military branches investing in artificial intelligence and the cloud to improve operations.

Troy Bertram, Google Public Sector’s executive managing director of partner ecosystem, told CRN in an interview that most public sector opportunities the Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud and AI giant has pursued this year “not only have a partner, they have multiple partners.”

“Customers want to buy firm-fixed-price,” said Bertram, a U.S. Army veteran who served as a communications officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. “We still have a unique offering in our subscription agreement where we can–for one-year, three-year, five-year outcomes–give a customer firm-fixed-price through our channel and through sell partners.”

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Google Public Sector Partner Investment

Public sector organizations are interested in referenceable and repeatable technology products and services, hence Google’s investment in building out a public sector ecosystem.

“Pennsylvania or Florida or California, there’s the same tax, there’s the same health and human services, there’s the same infrastructure challenges,” Bertram said. The U.S. “Navy wants to look at where else in the Navy have we done this, or in the Army or Air Force or in Cyber Command. So it’s really looking at, how do we quickly innovate for a customer, and then help our partners go horizontally.”

Google wants to meet public sector customers where they are, enabling them to get cutting-edge technology through trusted partners, familiar marketplaces and existing contract vehicles.

When asked about AI adoption in the public sector, Bertram (pictured) pointed to the U.S. Navy and Air Force leveraging AI to measure vehicle performance, colleges and universities looking for a better way to handle admissions, states looking to improve tollway operations.

“Something simple that’s existed for years, but any one of us that travels and has multiple toll tag systems and billing and invoicing, the ability to transform that is not just to the state of Texas,” for example, Bertram said. “We’ve seen New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania all put out RFPs (requests for proposal) looking for where else have we done this? And can you work across my incumbent vendors? … Simple example of where AI, we’re not trying to move data. We’re not trying to rebuild the infrastructure. We’re using data and transforming it to support a mission.”

Bertram said he hopes that the public sector partner program enhancements show a more partner-friendly Google.

“We do delivery through our partners,” he said. “They’re the critical component to how we get scale. We are an amazing technology company. We are not a services company.”

Here’s more of what Bertram had to say about the opportunity for Google public sector partners.

What do you want partners to know about the newly enhanced Google Public Sector Partner Program?

What we have endeavored to do is taking feedback and iterating on partner program requirements for government and education customers via the channel. … We had to take what works out of (the umbrella Google partner program) Partner Advantage and public sector-ize it … to make sure that how government wants to contract, buy for services, buy for infrastructure, buy for technology, especially with AI and new companies launching applications, building on top of our platform.

Also the security compliance accreditation, so think FedRAMP (the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) … and our ability to help a software company big or small land in an accredited environment and quickly iterate so that we don’t have the historical 12-to-18 months plus of giving an authority to operate for their applications.

So our program … (we want to) make it easier for a partner to register an opportunity with us and have differentiated support if they’re the incumbent or they’re pursuing and working on shaping an opportunity. … Most IT projects in government are 80 percent services and 20 percent infrastructure.

So we want to make sure with those companies, whether they’re large or small, working on everything from workspace to security operations, SecOps, or whether it’s infrastructure or AI transformation, that there’s different partners that are developing capabilities.

First is have a program that allows opportunity registration, meets all federal laws and regulations about differentiation of solutions. … No. 2 is for those partners that have clearly identified as having past performance, they’ve invested in the Google practice, whether it’s a services or delivery practice, that we identify who they are and we show past performance with government.

Sometimes that can be public or private past performance reference-ability, where, if a U.S. intelligence community customer wants to know where we’ve done this before and with which partners–or the Department of Defense or state of California may have different contractual requirements and different partners that they’re looking for.

So taking … our competency programs and our specialization programs of that we have in Partner Advantage and adding a public sector flavor to them that says you have proven past performance contract vehicles, delivery readiness index scores, you have human capital that can deliver against these programs. And launching that badging capabilities for our customers and partners.

Many of the partners are also looking for, ‘I want to partner with a small business, socioeconomically diverse supplier that’s a requirement under the SBA (U.S. Small Business Administration). So enhancing our small business program … that we launched last year … if we have a small (partner) that may not meet the premier requirements of Partner Advantage because of size or specialization, we want to make sure that we’ve identified, we’ve worked with and we’ve illuminated for our teams, but also a large systems integrator that may be looking for a small that does workspace delivery to the Department of Defense (for example) … or that does national security and has a depth of cleared resources. …We are the conduit to make sure that our partners and customers can find that small business.

How about the Gemini opportunities in the enhanced program?

We’re using our own Gemini to enhance our marketing capabilities. And it’s really around regional events where many of our customers don’t go to large national events, or they might not have travel budget.

So it’s going out to an event in Seattle, Wash., where I was with one of our partners last week. … where regional partners were in attendance … and regional customers. How do we make sure that we’re connecting at those regional events broadly with our teams and bringing the right partner solutions in advance of where the customers are? … Other (enhancements) include (Google’s) Rapid Innovation Team and our professional services capabilities where we subcontract to and with many of our services partners.

That increasing rate of change that’s happening in this industry–especially with AI–of getting to solutions. And how do we go from prototype to program-of-record and launching those solutions rapidly in support of our customers, whether it’s health and human services, or tax adjudication, or it’s helping a university find grant money from the federal government and using AI to help write those grants and research for a grant, as well as connecting to our innovation teams and helping with the co-build.

What’s led to this new investment in public sector partners?

It’s customers looking for, ‘I want to get to Google technology.’ We had to, as a company in the business over the last three years, really accredit the baseline of many of our offerings, IL (Impact Level, a scoring system for information confidentiality, integrity and availability) 4, 5, 6, at which point customers are asking for services.

They’re also asking for delivery partners and capabilities. So we’ve been building to this for the last three years.

Now we’re really looking at, how do we augment AI capabilities into a rapid succession … historically speaking, you show up jointly with a partner, you give a sales product pitch, you respond to an RFP (request for proposal).

Now the capabilities are … with open architectures and publicly available data, we can come in and show, without having to transform infrastructure, the years of lift and shift, and then we’ll hopefully do something transformative with your data.

It takes time, energy effort, costs the government, all of us as taxpayers, a lot of money. Now we can look in a hybrid environment with partners, do a purpose-built demo in a very short period of time and come in and demonstrate capabilities.

And where we have partners in the existing contract vehicles or change orders … we can look at existing programs of showing and demonstrating capabilities in real time.

But we have to help bring along our partners. We have Googlers that have expertise in technology. We are not on site with the customer, day in and day out, seeing what the majority of their problem sets are. So getting to their engineering and their services delivery teams to help with that transformation and the art of the possible.

Are there still opportunities beyond AI in public sector, like in cloud?

The overall tech opportunity, by any analyst, you will see a wide degree of how much is moved to the cloud. The reality is, how much we actually transformed, whether that data is sitting in existing, very legacy infrastructure, either on-prem, hybrid environment. Or it’s even mainframe.

The amount of mainframe, I was reading the other day … in this past year, that the No. 1, most expensive human that the government contracts for is a legacy mainframe automation analyst. I don’t think we’ve seen much automation in mainframes in decades.

But there’s still that sunk capital. And when we look at the federal government, there is so much of the budget being set aside annually for just maintaining the operational viability of legacy tech, let alone integrating into new tech.

And what we need to transform, whether it’s the future systems or cybersecurity threats–our integration of Mandiant (bought by Google in 2022) and what we’re seeing across the landscape of cybersecurity … or … how do I get research grants at a federal level, working with federal government all the way through, how do we protect that environment from threats today, plus bad actor threats in the future?

It’s a complicated landscape. A lot of it’s all around, how do you transform the data where it is today? Not just a lift-and-shift. That doesn’t bring the power of cloud. It just moves around your cost.

What are continued obstacles in public sector AI adoption?

I don’t think it’s as much the technology in training the models and the models as much as it is humans trying to understand the impact of, today, what can I do with AI?

What does it mean to my business, my organization? And then, do we have rules in place in each agency? How do I buy? How do I implement? And is there a process to follow with emerging tech?

Us following and trying to educate … (it is) why we have a partner program specific to public sector.

And the public sector-izing is, we all speak the same language, which is getting through government acquisition. … It still comes down to, how do you do transformative work through government contracts. Partners that are and understand the mission requirements are critical to us scaling. … The demo capabilities of show me what customers are doing.

Whether it’s with the American Cancer Society using machine learning … those new insights into not only prevention but treatment. That is applicable, those learnings, those demos, across multiple other not only health agencies but educational institutions.

What we’re learning from the state of New Mexico with water leak identification, saving millions of gallons of water annually, is applicable not only across the South and the West, but also the same technology, using (Google’s) BigQuery and machine learning can be used with state of Colorado (for example) with their natural resources–not only environmental considerations, but also their state wildlife populations.

The same applicability of here’s what we can do with data, just apply it to a different data set. Or how are we changing the course matrix using Kubernetes at a university system is applicable across the entire gamut.

Showing those demonstrations of capabilities and the art of the possible using real, live data today and our ability to transform a demo that previously would have taken significant human capital and months to prepare, to show, to validate and test, we can do in hours and come back to a customer really quickly with partners and show those capabilities to get the ideation going.