Persistent Partner Series | Ayon Banerjee | Persistent Systems & Pallab Deb | Google Cloud

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Ayon Banerjee

Chief Strategy and Growth Officer

Persistent Systems

Pallab Deb

Managing Director, Global Ecosystems

Google Cloud

Shelly Kramer

Tech Analyst

theCUBE Research

play_circle_outline Strategic partnership agreement between Persistent Systems and Google Cloud

play_circle_outline Benefits of partnership for clients and companies

play_circle_outline Importance of delivery and support for cloud-based systems

play_circle_outline PSO's Proactive Partner Support & Google's Success Services Enhance Delivery Engagements for Partners

play_circle_outline Google Cloud's growth and expansion strategies focus on partner ecosystem and joint solutions.

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Ayon Banerjee | Persistent Systems & Pallab Deb | Google Cloud

Ayon Banerjee

Chief Strategy and Growth Officer Persistent Systems

Pallab Deb

Managing Director, Global Ecosystems Google Cloud

Shelly Kramer

Tech Analyst theCUBE Research

HOST

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>> Hello and welcome to theCUBE and to this installment of the Persistent Partners series. I'm your host, Shelley Kramer. I'm the managing director and principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. And today I'm joined by Ayon Banerjee, the chief strategy and growth officer at Persistent Systems and Pallab Deb, who's the managing director, SI, industry GTM partnerships at Google Cloud. And we're going to have a conversation about the strategic partnership between Persistent Systems and Google Cloud. Gentlemen, welcome. I'm so glad to see you today.

Pallab Deb

>> Good to see you, Shelley.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Great to be here, Shelley.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Well, I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. So Persistent Systems, Google Cloud, this partnership is a very big deal. Not only does it align with the broader trends in the IT services market, it really nicely positions both companies for future growth. From what I can see, the strategic partnership marks a significant milestone in your collective efforts to drive innovation and deliver exceptional value to clients. And that's what everybody wants, right? So I'm so looking forward to delving into the specifics of this partnership with YouTube, exploring your mutual objectives and the benefits of this strategic partnership and really learning more about how you envision how it can and will impact your shared client. So I can't wait to get started. Pallab, I'm going to start with you. Will you share with us some details of the strategic partnership agreement, especially how the partnership is structured to enhance collaboration and innovation? Because I think that's what clients are really going to be excited about.

Pallab Deb

>> Fantastic. Shelley, thanks for having me and great question to tee off this morning. I'm going to go and do a little bit of a storytelling mode here, but I think it's important to set the perspective. So I joined Google about five years ago, and when I did, we were roughly $6 billion business in the cloud. And if you looked at the last quarterly earnings, we are today roughly at about 40 billion plus in an annual revenue clip. So that's an amazing story of growth over the last five years or so. And one of the things that's been integral to this growth journey is that we've been a hundred percent partner focused, partner attached right from the get go. When we came into this business back in 2019, actually we've been in cloud longer than 2019, but 2019 is when Thomas Kurian joined and the cloud orientation took a whole new meaning altogether. We were significantly subscale compared to our competition, both in terms of feet on the ground in terms of salespeople, partner ecosystem, number of people that would go and be able to deliver on Google Cloud. And one of the early realizations was that we are never going to be able to make up for our late entry so as to say by trying to do it all alone. So being partner focus was integral to our broad journey right from the get go. And I'll tell you what, Shelley, it's actually paid dividends. This entire growth journey that I just referred to has been fueled by partners. So zero to 40, 6 to 40, it's significant acceleration driven by partners. Now, when you stare in the bow of the ship and look forward and look at our journey from 40 to hopefully a hundred at a few years, I would say the partner intensity or the partnering motion only gets more intense. However, there's a little slight nuances in regards to what sort of partners will matter more or will matter to us as we pivot from 40 to 100. And if you start thinking through that and look at the market dynamics to the second part of your question, how do customers benefit? What does it mean to customers, et cetera? You start realizing that, okay, the customer buying preferences, buying patterns of change, generative AI in some sense bought in a whole new meaning to how people consume technology and what it can do for businesses. Cyber security has taken in a whole new meaning, especially after everything that we have seen in the last few quarters. And we are realizing that these are important for customers across all segments, not just the biggest partners out customers out there, but across segments. These are common concerns, common aspects of mind behavior. And as we look at that change from our demand signal and we think about how do we look at partners to capitalize and really bring value to that partner, to those customers, we are looking for more agile partners, more high growth partners, partners that can transcend different customer segments, not just play at the top of the pyramid. And in that regard, we've been very clinical at scanning the thousands of SIs that we work with and literally cherry-picking about 10 or so that really bring number one, scale. Number two, complementing that scale, a high degree of nimble and agile attitude in their approach to market, highly customer focused. And lastly, deep expertise in industries and in technology. So when you look at those three aspects, Persistent really stands out as one of those partners that we really want to engage with and build scale with to go after this new set of buying behaviors in the market, which we think will just accelerate quarter to a quarter as we look forward to the future. So the strategic partnership agreement is nothing but formalizing that motion by bringing to bear what both parties can bring to the table to capitalize on this opportunity that's here right now and waiting for us to go and make the best off of both our customers and for both our companies. I hope that I picture.

Pallab Deb

>> I think that makes perfect sense and what I have seen as an analyst across the tech ecosystem really in the last five plus years, and even taking into consideration a global pandemic, but partnership is really kind of the name of the game and it is such a smart path to go on in working with a cadre of trusted vendor partners and really with a view toward how can we not only be agile to your point, but how can we speed results for clients? And I think the mindset, we used to have a mindset I think in corporate America that we had to do it all ourselves and we couldn't share any of our secrets and we certainly couldn't bring a partner in or somebody who might compete in some way or whatever. And I think what we're seeing is a natural evolution, and some of this is part of the digital transformation journey, but I think you're seeing that, and I think you're seeing this with big companies like Persistent Systems and Google and other major players in the technology space. It's that we're better together and the bottom line is about serving our customers better. And so when we can be better together, everybody wins. So I see a lot of that happening here.

Pallab Deb

>> Love the tagline. Better together. .

Pallab Deb

>> Better together, there we go. Ayon, talk with us a little bit about the benefits of this partnership. Pallab did a fantastic job, but talk with us a little bit about the benefits of this partnership and the mutual advantages that you see for both Persistent Systems and Google.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah, no, I mean this is a really, really exciting topic and maybe I'll start from where Pallab left off because if you think about it, the whole better together model, we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and also very open. So there are many paradoxes that are going on right now in the industry. And if you think about it, our customers have a lot of choices and it is almost impossible for a company of our size and scale to be able to solve our customer's problems if we were to try and do it all by ourselves. And one of the mottos that we as a company have is that we like to be seen as the orchestrator of choice for our customers. So what that means is whether you're looking for something on the data side or whether you're looking something on the cloud side or whether you're looking at a set of verticalized and horizontal solutions, we try and do this through a combination of us and partners such as Google. Now, if you really think about the SPA, the SPA is really a culmination of something that has been in the making for the last decade. And Persistent as a company, I don't know how many people know this, but the word persistent comes from persistent in database. So that's something which for the last 30 years from the time we were conceived by our founder, Dr. Deshpande, we've been true to our core. So we are very deep from a data standpoint. And over the years, I mean the entire data stack is something that we take to our clients and really help them unlock the value of the data that they have both internally as well as externally. And over the last decade or so, I would say that this data has suddenly started moving from indoors to outdoors to the cloud. And from that vantage point, what you've done is really developed a core set of competency, but we are trying to sew together, how do you drive this data? How do you take it to the cloud? How do you really modernize the overall infrastructure for our clients and truly help them unlock the full value of the tech investments? So from that vantage point, we've obviously been very fortunate to have been partnering with Google Cloud and whether it is the Google Cloud itself or everything in the platform starting from the models that Gemini brings in place, Vertex and Looker and so on so forth, when you start sewing the whole stack together, all of a sudden the power of one plus one equals 11 becomes a reality.

>> I love that.

Ayon Banerjee

>> And that is something where we are saying that, look, I mean this strategic partnership agreement that we are now embarking on, it's a multi-year partnership. This will really start taking the impact that we take to our clients to a different level altogether. We start getting access to technology much way before the technology is commercially available. So which means that we are taking our clients much ahead from a go-to-market standpoint. From a time-to-market standpoint, we are helping them beat their competition. We are trying to help them optimize their spends. We are trying to help take legacy brick and mortar companies and they're all on this accelerated path from a digital transformation standpoint. We are helping accelerate those journeys. If you're talking about digital native clients, then obviously we come in and really help them at the core from the product engineering standpoint, from a custom software development standpoint and really take those workloads to the cloud. So in my mind, this is really kind of the next frontier of the relationship between our firms. And we are just about starting to scratch the surface in terms of what's possible between our two companies, going to our clients and really changing the nature of how they look at their overall tech investments. I mean, it's not a difficult say for sure, but look again started by saying that customers have an abundance of choices.

>> Yeah, they do.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah. And so we have to lead with impact at the center of every discussion and every narrative that we have. And this ability to actually join forces and go to our clients with the narrative, with the right amount of conviction behind that narrative, the burden of proof is on us. And if you think about it from a gen AI standpoint, we are rapidly approaching the second year anniversary and clients are now, I would say in the last couple of quarters, starting to get from POCs and they're starting to talk about how do you really take these gen AI-based POCs to production and how could this start altering the enterprise level SLAs and KPIs that these companies have. So I think the value that this provides to our enterprise clients at the end of the day is going way beyond the traditional IT landscape and is starting to really get into the core of the businesses, of the clients that we serve. So yes, on the one hand, while it seems like a no-brainer because gone are the days where clients were thinking about, hey, should we adopt or not? It's becoming a race to saying that, "Can I really beat my competition in terms of getting the best of suite in and in terms of driving those improvements in business transformation?"

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah, and I think you're right. We're getting to beyond the should I adopt and it's heck yes, I'm adopting, how can I do this in a way that makes the most sense for our organization and how can we speed time to value? And I think that's a little bit of a part of this value prop that I see as well. One of the things I would love if you would walk us through some examples of some of the potential services and solutions that will be available.

Pallab Deb

>> Go for it for it. And I'll add it in.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Sure. Let me just dig it off and Pallab and I, we've been talking about this for close to the last one year right now, and if you think about the clients that we serve, look, I mean we are centered... We don't spread ourselves thin, so we are centered around three primary industry verticals. So banking, financial services and insurance is one of them. Healthcare life sciences is the second one. And then all things high-tech comms, media, telecom, that's the third one. So what we are doing right now is we are really trying to say that how do we really take our combined assets to our clients and really help them, whether it's a set of horizontal solutions or whether it's a set of vertical solutions. Pick life sciences as an example, and I'm just taking this on the fly. From a life sciences standpoint, we are all coming out of COVID. If you were to just think about the world that we lived in three years back and the world that we live in today, how fortunate are we, right? We are all talking right now with the smiles on our face thanks to the vaccines and the pace that these vaccines came out. Today, if you look at drug development, if you look at everything from discovering a molecule to developing that molecule into a commercial drug, I mean the cycle used to be 10 to 13 years, and now we are starting to talk about a cycle which is really shrinking dramatically. It is not limited to the vaccines, it's limited to many rare disorders, it's limited to... Or rather I should say that you talk about oncology, you talk about diabetes, you talk about cardiovascular issues. I mean it's all at the end of the day looking at data coming from the patient community, the hospital community, the insurance community, the labs, the radiology community. How do you take all of this and start making seemingly insightful sense out of this and then help shrink this entire life cycle to be able to tackle a problem which is plaguing our planet? And this is where we go to many of our life sciences client and we are actually helping them string these life cycles through the power of generative AI, AI and the machine learning through the power of core data analytics and driving insights on the back of that analytics. And similarly, if you were to take this example to a bank, if you were to take this example to a telco, there are a plethora of such examples where we are partnering, where we are holding hands and saying that how can you really help them reimagine their businesses to be able to solve foundational problems that they have had over the last several decades? So super exciting times if you ask me personally. We are just starting to see green shoots of this and in very meaningful ways, and this partnership is all about going to start looking at some of these high propensity business transformation use cases and making them real for our common clients.

Ayon Banerjee

>> So Pallab, talk a little bit if you would, on the heels of this from Ayon, what about delivery and support for cloud-based systems? How will this alliance enhance that?

Pallab Deb

>> See, the way we see it is, look, partnering like you started off in the beginning, has been around, this is a no-brainer, but this something fundamentally different at this stage. And this ties into your question as to how is delivery going to become important, right? There's fundamental differences. Look, it's no longer a partnering for simplicity of buying, or reducing the complexity of buying, which is very early on partnering. It is neither keeping the lights on, which was something that we saw in the early part of the decade. And this is truly about saying that, okay, can you use that technology to really help me transform my business in a very secure way. And transformation at the end of the day, Shelley, I think we all get it. It's not about better workflows, it's about better insights and better decision making that helps you step keep a step ahead of your competitors. And that's where Google comes in. I mean, we've been using data and AI for so long in all our products and all of us, and there are about nine products of Google that have a billion users each. Consumer users and all of us probably touched them when one way or the other and experience the benefits of how getting from point A to point B has become easier with AI coming in or how writing an email has become easier, right? Now to bring that experience into the corporate world, into the enterprise world, easier said than done because there are legacy systems to contend with. There are data silos to contend with. And while technology can solve many of these, it does need a deep understanding of that business of the journey from getting from that siloed mess to this utopian world of seamless experience like what we experience in the consumer world. And in that regard, technical acumen is important, but it's also important to use the best tools that are out there, get the advisory from the best experts that are out there. And what Google has done is it is deliberately focused on building out what we call a delivery enablement portfolio with a lot of muscle around it. And let me explain what that means. Literally a successful delivery at a client doesn't start on the day you sign the contract. It honestly starts perhaps six to nine months before that, which means six to nine months before that, we engage with our partners to make sure they have the right pool of talented people so they can deploy those people in the right people, in the right place. So which means making sure that you have the easiest way to access our training, get to a certification, go to our boot camps and all of that stuff. Now at the point of signing the contract when you're ready to start delivery, there's also another set of intervention that comes in. We sit down and offer with our partners and our clients joint boot camps sometimes at no cost to the customer or the client. We bring in run books that PSO has developed. PSO is Professional Services Org, which is a very small org within Google, but what it does is it harnesses the knowledge of all the deliveries that are happening in Google Cloud, literally across the world. And so we harness that knowledge and create cookbooks or run books that are made available to the partner team so that they are productive right from day one, right? So the run books, the boot camps, getting the right people in the place gets you off to a good start. But as any one of us who've been in delivery know surprises will happen. There's not two ways about it. It is bound to happen at some point of time or the other. And the question is, how can you help that partner at that point when a surprise happens? And that's where we bring together partner success services, which is really where our professional services organization spends bulk of its time. So what it does is it makes itself available to be proactively injected into complex delivery engagements. So we can come and advise the partner and the customer on the architecture, on the roadmap, on certain technical nuances so that the delivery is really successful. And we try and avoid those surprises. The good news is a lot of this stuff really doesn't come with a high price point or at any price point for partners and customers. This is Google injecting itself with its partners to make sure delivery is successful. And today, in the world of gen AI where technology is changing so fast, in the world where security is the number one concern, being able to bring the best of Google and our experiences of delivering these complex programs across the world and making it available at each point of truth, let's say, is really where we spend a lot of time and effort on.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And really, I mean, it's been obvious... Obviously I've been tracking Google Cloud for the last decade and watching that growth, and it's been clear that there's been a goal of aggressively growing that cloud business and expanding partner ecosystem. We see that on a regular basis. And then that sales delivery, joint solution development focus, it's all very obvious and I think it's working for you.

Pallab Deb

>> It's working. I would say it's working partners seem to be... It resonates with partners. They see that this is truly partner focused company. We actually have a mandate internally that a hundred percent of our engagements have to have a partner on them, and it's kind of governed right at the top. So there's a high focus on partnerships and not just partnerships for the sake of a checkbox. Our field teams realize that, hey, we are built... Internally within Google, we are subscale in our ability to deliver. We need partners to deliver. People realize that Google isn't typically the destination for just lift and shift. People come to Google for transforming their businesses, which means you have to start with an innate understanding of the business on day zero. And you have to start with a good technical background so you can bring value quickly. Like we said, accelerate your time to value. That means that we engage early, we don't engage after a deal is closed, after a contract is signed, we try to bring in early. And this strategic partnership agreement really brings more intentionality and muscle around this whole process. It's like saying, "Hey, Persistent and Google, let's look at where we are headed for the next three years. Look at which accounts we want to target, which solutions we want to take to market, which markets do we want to penetrate and bring that early engagement into every facet of our motion."

Pallab Deb

>> Well, it's early engagement and strategy, that's obvious that it's really a strategic focus that's infusing everything that you're doing.

Pallab Deb

>> Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

>> Yeah, absolutely. So Ayon, I mean Persistent partnering with Google, as I mentioned earlier, is not a new thing. This is something like a 10 plus year collaboration. I'd love it if you would walk me through from your point of view, some highlights of that collaboration and maybe talk a little bit about the role that your ecosystem, your partner ecosystem at Persistent plays here.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Absolutely. Very happy to do that. Look, I think, so the hallmark of this partnership has been that we've been really keeping the client at the center of everything. And we've been constantly engaging with the tech disruption that the industry is looking at and saying that how do you take advantage of the tech disruption to the value of our clients? And to that extent, we've gone to the extent of building out centers of excellence across cloud. We've gone to the extent of building out data and AI and ML-based centers of excellence. We've even gone to the extent of making acquisitions of companies who were very focused on the Google Cloud ecosystem. And essentially what we did is when you look at choice points that are available to larger companies like us, once you acquire an organization, as you integrate them to an existing setup, I think, so what we've done is we've actually acquired a company. We got that in, which was a hundred percent Google Cloud focused company, and we made that the epicenter of all things Google Cloud within Persistent. So all of a sudden, rather than having four or five different businesses that we're all tailoring towards this bigger, broader tech stack, including Google Cloud being scattered across Persistent, we took all of that, put it into one view, and that view has being the one that's been really championing everything for us in Persistent. And I think that's been one of the core reasons why we stayed very focused in terms of building on this partnership and what was earlier more of here are 2, 3, 4 areas that we deal with, I think so now the nature of this partnership is much more expensive. It is cutting across all the verticals that we are playing in. It is no longer dominated by one or two countries, but it is now a global partnership. So everything from countries in Australia and New Zealand to Asia to the massively thriving startup ecosystem in India, to Europe, to North America, this partnership basically spreads its wings across all these spaces. So if you personally ask me what happens now that we have this strategic partnership agreement with Google, all we're saying is that continue to do the work that we've done for our clients in a handful of these geographies. But then take it rinse and replicate that, continue to play ahead of the curve, continue to have an early access to the technology that's coming up from Google Cloud, take it to our clients and help them solve some of the most complex problems that they're dealing with today.

>> I love it. And I don't-

Ayon Banerjee

>> That's .

>> I'm sorry?

Ayon Banerjee

>> Sorry, go ahead. Please go ahead.

>> No, well, my next question was just really going to be, Persistent is not an unknown company, but I would love for you to just hit on quickly on... Talk with us a little bit about Persistence's reputation, and the public cloud space and your delivery expertise chops. I think that plays kind of a significant role here.

Ayon Banerjee

>> So look, there are two sets of folks in the industry who look at you as a service provider and determine where do you lie in that continuum in terms of your maturity levels. One are of course our clients, in terms of the trust that they best throw upon the service provider. And the second is, of course, the analyst community. And if you look at it, let me just pick on the analyst community for a moment. So if you look at the analyst community, a few years back, we were just about a small dot in the cloud transformation space. But if you look at the strides that we've been making now on the back of all the work we are doing from cloud transformation standpoint, and when I say cloud transformation, I mean public cloud transformation, we've become a very strong credible challenger. Where we are fortunate to have now been ahead of some of our much larger tier one peers. Now, this wouldn't have happened by just us going and spreading collateral in the market, it's coming on the back of peer reviews, which means when the analyst is looking at publishing their overall, let me call it the magic quadrant right now. The magic quadrant is essentially getting feedback from our clients. The clients are coming in and saying that here's a partner which is agile, nimble, small enough to really care, large enough to scale and getting into the weeds of how do we really drive our cloud transformation journey, land that out, implement that, and then run it. And we do this again and again across all the industry vertical that we are playing in. So look, we are a small player, but having said that, we've also been growing dramatically. Just a few numbers for our audience, I think. So our revenue has been growing about 25% for the last five years in an industry that has been through COVID, in an industry, growth rates been negative, and we've been consistently growing. This is all on the back of the client trust that we've been earning. If you look at the values from a valuation perspective and a shareholder return standpoint, again, it's more than a triple digit growth from a shareholder return perspective over the last five years time. So I would say that look, I mean we are for the clients that we've worked with, we are a very trusted partner and they trust us on some of their most complex problems. And obviously as we continue to grow, we'll continue to bank on this partnership in terms of really helping us get into bigger, broader problems, problems which are longer term in terms of requiring to solve them. And I can only say that we are operating in a very complex and a reasonably challenging macro industry, and the overall economics are also rather challenging, but we continue to be fairly bullish on the back of the client deliveries that we are driving. And these partnerships, I mean the partnership with Google, which is as expensive as it is, will certainly play a very large role in terms of continuing this growth trajectory.

>> Yeah. Well, and you know what it all boils down to? Happy clients. When you deliver in a way that makes your clients happy, helps them be more successful, more profitable, grow at the speed that they want. I mean, that's really the magic. And so that's great to be a part of. So as we wrap this conversation, let's explore for a moment some of the broader IT services market trends. Pallab, what are you seeing out there in terms of... I mean, I think we touched on this just a few minutes ago, but buyer behavior is changing, buyer demand is changing. How are the market dynamics shifting?

Pallab Deb

>> Yeah, I think there's, like you said, a very pronounced change in what customers are looking for. And so that will not repeat that. So I think what that is doing is it's challenging us as a technology provider to be at the leading edge of making sure our technology is getting out there in a secure way. I amplify security so much over and over again because we are really hearing from our customers that they are worried about, "Hey, is the data leakage happening?" Is there an ability for them to convince their suppliers and customers that they can operate in a secure environment when they go to the cloud? And those things have become front and center. So you really look at how buying behaviors are changing and what the imperatives are thereof for everybody in the CPU system. Us as a hyperscaler, our SI partners or our ISV partners, it's all about making sure that the best of technologies is being brought to customers in a very secure way, in a way where the customers do have control of how they use that technology. They have the ability to initiate something, stop something, or restart something at their will and at their desire. And then they have from a viewpoint of a SI partner ecosystem, looking for people that can not just manage the technical complexity of what's on the table, but actually operated almost like a managed service. That's becoming a very important part. And where we are seeing this is people are actually constructing, let's say, deals or contracts where they're just not taking care of the technology estate, but they're taking care of the outcome that the business process is driving, underpinned by the technology estate. So especially let's say with generative AI, just let's throw an example with insurance as an example. It's not just about bringing in the technology for supporting your claims or your underwriting, but actually taking on a goal of seeing how you can make that process more efficient or reduce leakage and taking that as an outcome in your contract itself. And that means a really, really deep partnership and a really deep ability to understand technology and business process and manage that complexity for that customer as a whole.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I love it. I love it.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Maybe if I could just add something to what Pallab said.

>> Of course.

Ayon Banerjee

>> The other thing is that what we're seeing is now non-CIO functions are also starting to play a very active role in the decision-making lifecycle, right? Because it is all stemming from a business problem that they're trying to solve. The CIO is obviously facilitating the solve of that problem. So if you look at us, I mean, as a service provider, our conversations are now going way beyond just tech. Our conversations are starting at business and then getting down to the tech stack and then getting down to the implementation of that tech stack. I would say that's another very clear shift that we are seeing. So while the CIO and the CTO organization continues to be integral to all of this, but on the demand side, you're starting to see multiple buying personas that are coming into the picture. And that is also helping us get much more expensive on the one hand and sharper on the other in terms of truly solving that enterprise level problem.

>> Well, I came into this conversation knowing that it was going to be fantastic. You gentlemen did not disappoint. It's clear that the strategic partnership between Persistence Systems and Google Cloud is exactly the kind of innovative collaboration that the market needs today to meet the evolving demands of the IT services market. And I see this combination, this combination of resources and expertise between Persistence Systems and Google really, really serves to position you so well to deliver for clients. And I think we've talked about this fostering innovation, driving growth, really helping clients be more competitive. All of this I think is an important part of the equation. And I think what customers are looking for is help navigating this rapidly changing landscape of enterprise IT services. So I love this collaboration. I think that it's solving for many, many customers, and I think that there are great things ahead for both of you. Ayon Banerjee, chief strategy and growth officer at Persistence Systems, Pallab Deb, managing director SI and industry go-to-market partnerships at Google Cloud. You've been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today, for sharing news of this collaboration between your companies. And I am guessing there will be good things ahead for both of you and for your customers as a result. And to our audience, thank you for joining us here at theCUBE, your source for enterprise and emerging tech news. I'm Shelley Kramer, and we'll see you next time.

Ayon Banerjee | Persistent Systems & Pallab Deb | Google Cloud

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>> Hello and welcome to theCUBE and to this installment of the Persistent Partners series. I'm your host, Shelley Kramer. I'm the managing director and principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. And today I'm joined by Ayon Banerjee, the chief strategy and growth officer at Persistent Systems and Pallab Deb, who's the managing director, SI, industry GTM partnerships at Google Cloud. And we're going to have a conversation about the strategic partnership between Persistent Systems and Google Cloud. Gentlemen, welcome. I'm so glad to see you today.

Pallab Deb

>> Good to see you, Shelley.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Great to be here, Shelley.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Well, I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. So Persistent Systems, Google Cloud, this partnership is a very big deal. Not only does it align with the broader trends in the IT services market, it really nicely positions both companies for future growth. From what I can see, the strategic partnership marks a significant milestone in your collective efforts to drive innovation and deliver exceptional value to clients. And that's what everybody wants, right? So I'm so looking forward to delving into the specifics of this partnership with YouTube, exploring your mutual objectives and the benefits of this strategic partnership and really learning more about how you envision how it can and will impact your shared client. So I can't wait to get started. Pallab, I'm going to start with you. Will you share with us some details of the strategic partnership agreement, especially how the partnership is structured to enhance collaboration and innovation? Because I think that's what clients are really going to be excited about.

Pallab Deb

>> Fantastic. Shelley, thanks for having me and great question to tee off this morning. I'm going to go and do a little bit of a storytelling mode here, but I think it's important to set the perspective. So I joined Google about five years ago, and when I did, we were roughly $6 billion business in the cloud. And if you looked at the last quarterly earnings, we are today roughly at about 40 billion plus in an annual revenue clip. So that's an amazing story of growth over the last five years or so. And one of the things that's been integral to this growth journey is that we've been a hundred percent partner focused, partner attached right from the get go. When we came into this business back in 2019, actually we've been in cloud longer than 2019, but 2019 is when Thomas Kurian joined and the cloud orientation took a whole new meaning altogether. We were significantly subscale compared to our competition, both in terms of feet on the ground in terms of salespeople, partner ecosystem, number of people that would go and be able to deliver on Google Cloud. And one of the early realizations was that we are never going to be able to make up for our late entry so as to say by trying to do it all alone. So being partner focus was integral to our broad journey right from the get go. And I'll tell you what, Shelley, it's actually paid dividends. This entire growth journey that I just referred to has been fueled by partners. So zero to 40, 6 to 40, it's significant acceleration driven by partners. Now, when you stare in the bow of the ship and look forward and look at our journey from 40 to hopefully a hundred at a few years, I would say the partner intensity or the partnering motion only gets more intense. However, there's a little slight nuances in regards to what sort of partners will matter more or will matter to us as we pivot from 40 to 100. And if you start thinking through that and look at the market dynamics to the second part of your question, how do customers benefit? What does it mean to customers, et cetera? You start realizing that, okay, the customer buying preferences, buying patterns of change, generative AI in some sense bought in a whole new meaning to how people consume technology and what it can do for businesses. Cyber security has taken in a whole new meaning, especially after everything that we have seen in the last few quarters. And we are realizing that these are important for customers across all segments, not just the biggest partners out customers out there, but across segments. These are common concerns, common aspects of mind behavior. And as we look at that change from our demand signal and we think about how do we look at partners to capitalize and really bring value to that partner, to those customers, we are looking for more agile partners, more high growth partners, partners that can transcend different customer segments, not just play at the top of the pyramid. And in that regard, we've been very clinical at scanning the thousands of SIs that we work with and literally cherry-picking about 10 or so that really bring number one, scale. Number two, complementing that scale, a high degree of nimble and agile attitude in their approach to market, highly customer focused. And lastly, deep expertise in industries and in technology. So when you look at those three aspects, Persistent really stands out as one of those partners that we really want to engage with and build scale with to go after this new set of buying behaviors in the market, which we think will just accelerate quarter to a quarter as we look forward to the future. So the strategic partnership agreement is nothing but formalizing that motion by bringing to bear what both parties can bring to the table to capitalize on this opportunity that's here right now and waiting for us to go and make the best off of both our customers and for both our companies. I hope that I picture.

Pallab Deb

>> I think that makes perfect sense and what I have seen as an analyst across the tech ecosystem really in the last five plus years, and even taking into consideration a global pandemic, but partnership is really kind of the name of the game and it is such a smart path to go on in working with a cadre of trusted vendor partners and really with a view toward how can we not only be agile to your point, but how can we speed results for clients? And I think the mindset, we used to have a mindset I think in corporate America that we had to do it all ourselves and we couldn't share any of our secrets and we certainly couldn't bring a partner in or somebody who might compete in some way or whatever. And I think what we're seeing is a natural evolution, and some of this is part of the digital transformation journey, but I think you're seeing that, and I think you're seeing this with big companies like Persistent Systems and Google and other major players in the technology space. It's that we're better together and the bottom line is about serving our customers better. And so when we can be better together, everybody wins. So I see a lot of that happening here.

Pallab Deb

>> Love the tagline. Better together. .

Pallab Deb

>> Better together, there we go. Ayon, talk with us a little bit about the benefits of this partnership. Pallab did a fantastic job, but talk with us a little bit about the benefits of this partnership and the mutual advantages that you see for both Persistent Systems and Google.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah, no, I mean this is a really, really exciting topic and maybe I'll start from where Pallab left off because if you think about it, the whole better together model, we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and also very open. So there are many paradoxes that are going on right now in the industry. And if you think about it, our customers have a lot of choices and it is almost impossible for a company of our size and scale to be able to solve our customer's problems if we were to try and do it all by ourselves. And one of the mottos that we as a company have is that we like to be seen as the orchestrator of choice for our customers. So what that means is whether you're looking for something on the data side or whether you're looking something on the cloud side or whether you're looking at a set of verticalized and horizontal solutions, we try and do this through a combination of us and partners such as Google. Now, if you really think about the SPA, the SPA is really a culmination of something that has been in the making for the last decade. And Persistent as a company, I don't know how many people know this, but the word persistent comes from persistent in database. So that's something which for the last 30 years from the time we were conceived by our founder, Dr. Deshpande, we've been true to our core. So we are very deep from a data standpoint. And over the years, I mean the entire data stack is something that we take to our clients and really help them unlock the value of the data that they have both internally as well as externally. And over the last decade or so, I would say that this data has suddenly started moving from indoors to outdoors to the cloud. And from that vantage point, what you've done is really developed a core set of competency, but we are trying to sew together, how do you drive this data? How do you take it to the cloud? How do you really modernize the overall infrastructure for our clients and truly help them unlock the full value of the tech investments? So from that vantage point, we've obviously been very fortunate to have been partnering with Google Cloud and whether it is the Google Cloud itself or everything in the platform starting from the models that Gemini brings in place, Vertex and Looker and so on so forth, when you start sewing the whole stack together, all of a sudden the power of one plus one equals 11 becomes a reality.

>> I love that.

Ayon Banerjee

>> And that is something where we are saying that, look, I mean this strategic partnership agreement that we are now embarking on, it's a multi-year partnership. This will really start taking the impact that we take to our clients to a different level altogether. We start getting access to technology much way before the technology is commercially available. So which means that we are taking our clients much ahead from a go-to-market standpoint. From a time-to-market standpoint, we are helping them beat their competition. We are trying to help them optimize their spends. We are trying to help take legacy brick and mortar companies and they're all on this accelerated path from a digital transformation standpoint. We are helping accelerate those journeys. If you're talking about digital native clients, then obviously we come in and really help them at the core from the product engineering standpoint, from a custom software development standpoint and really take those workloads to the cloud. So in my mind, this is really kind of the next frontier of the relationship between our firms. And we are just about starting to scratch the surface in terms of what's possible between our two companies, going to our clients and really changing the nature of how they look at their overall tech investments. I mean, it's not a difficult say for sure, but look again started by saying that customers have an abundance of choices.

>> Yeah, they do.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah. And so we have to lead with impact at the center of every discussion and every narrative that we have. And this ability to actually join forces and go to our clients with the narrative, with the right amount of conviction behind that narrative, the burden of proof is on us. And if you think about it from a gen AI standpoint, we are rapidly approaching the second year anniversary and clients are now, I would say in the last couple of quarters, starting to get from POCs and they're starting to talk about how do you really take these gen AI-based POCs to production and how could this start altering the enterprise level SLAs and KPIs that these companies have. So I think the value that this provides to our enterprise clients at the end of the day is going way beyond the traditional IT landscape and is starting to really get into the core of the businesses, of the clients that we serve. So yes, on the one hand, while it seems like a no-brainer because gone are the days where clients were thinking about, hey, should we adopt or not? It's becoming a race to saying that, "Can I really beat my competition in terms of getting the best of suite in and in terms of driving those improvements in business transformation?"

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah, and I think you're right. We're getting to beyond the should I adopt and it's heck yes, I'm adopting, how can I do this in a way that makes the most sense for our organization and how can we speed time to value? And I think that's a little bit of a part of this value prop that I see as well. One of the things I would love if you would walk us through some examples of some of the potential services and solutions that will be available.

Pallab Deb

>> Go for it for it. And I'll add it in.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Sure. Let me just dig it off and Pallab and I, we've been talking about this for close to the last one year right now, and if you think about the clients that we serve, look, I mean we are centered... We don't spread ourselves thin, so we are centered around three primary industry verticals. So banking, financial services and insurance is one of them. Healthcare life sciences is the second one. And then all things high-tech comms, media, telecom, that's the third one. So what we are doing right now is we are really trying to say that how do we really take our combined assets to our clients and really help them, whether it's a set of horizontal solutions or whether it's a set of vertical solutions. Pick life sciences as an example, and I'm just taking this on the fly. From a life sciences standpoint, we are all coming out of COVID. If you were to just think about the world that we lived in three years back and the world that we live in today, how fortunate are we, right? We are all talking right now with the smiles on our face thanks to the vaccines and the pace that these vaccines came out. Today, if you look at drug development, if you look at everything from discovering a molecule to developing that molecule into a commercial drug, I mean the cycle used to be 10 to 13 years, and now we are starting to talk about a cycle which is really shrinking dramatically. It is not limited to the vaccines, it's limited to many rare disorders, it's limited to... Or rather I should say that you talk about oncology, you talk about diabetes, you talk about cardiovascular issues. I mean it's all at the end of the day looking at data coming from the patient community, the hospital community, the insurance community, the labs, the radiology community. How do you take all of this and start making seemingly insightful sense out of this and then help shrink this entire life cycle to be able to tackle a problem which is plaguing our planet? And this is where we go to many of our life sciences client and we are actually helping them string these life cycles through the power of generative AI, AI and the machine learning through the power of core data analytics and driving insights on the back of that analytics. And similarly, if you were to take this example to a bank, if you were to take this example to a telco, there are a plethora of such examples where we are partnering, where we are holding hands and saying that how can you really help them reimagine their businesses to be able to solve foundational problems that they have had over the last several decades? So super exciting times if you ask me personally. We are just starting to see green shoots of this and in very meaningful ways, and this partnership is all about going to start looking at some of these high propensity business transformation use cases and making them real for our common clients.

Ayon Banerjee

>> So Pallab, talk a little bit if you would, on the heels of this from Ayon, what about delivery and support for cloud-based systems? How will this alliance enhance that?

Pallab Deb

>> See, the way we see it is, look, partnering like you started off in the beginning, has been around, this is a no-brainer, but this something fundamentally different at this stage. And this ties into your question as to how is delivery going to become important, right? There's fundamental differences. Look, it's no longer a partnering for simplicity of buying, or reducing the complexity of buying, which is very early on partnering. It is neither keeping the lights on, which was something that we saw in the early part of the decade. And this is truly about saying that, okay, can you use that technology to really help me transform my business in a very secure way. And transformation at the end of the day, Shelley, I think we all get it. It's not about better workflows, it's about better insights and better decision making that helps you step keep a step ahead of your competitors. And that's where Google comes in. I mean, we've been using data and AI for so long in all our products and all of us, and there are about nine products of Google that have a billion users each. Consumer users and all of us probably touched them when one way or the other and experience the benefits of how getting from point A to point B has become easier with AI coming in or how writing an email has become easier, right? Now to bring that experience into the corporate world, into the enterprise world, easier said than done because there are legacy systems to contend with. There are data silos to contend with. And while technology can solve many of these, it does need a deep understanding of that business of the journey from getting from that siloed mess to this utopian world of seamless experience like what we experience in the consumer world. And in that regard, technical acumen is important, but it's also important to use the best tools that are out there, get the advisory from the best experts that are out there. And what Google has done is it is deliberately focused on building out what we call a delivery enablement portfolio with a lot of muscle around it. And let me explain what that means. Literally a successful delivery at a client doesn't start on the day you sign the contract. It honestly starts perhaps six to nine months before that, which means six to nine months before that, we engage with our partners to make sure they have the right pool of talented people so they can deploy those people in the right people, in the right place. So which means making sure that you have the easiest way to access our training, get to a certification, go to our boot camps and all of that stuff. Now at the point of signing the contract when you're ready to start delivery, there's also another set of intervention that comes in. We sit down and offer with our partners and our clients joint boot camps sometimes at no cost to the customer or the client. We bring in run books that PSO has developed. PSO is Professional Services Org, which is a very small org within Google, but what it does is it harnesses the knowledge of all the deliveries that are happening in Google Cloud, literally across the world. And so we harness that knowledge and create cookbooks or run books that are made available to the partner team so that they are productive right from day one, right? So the run books, the boot camps, getting the right people in the place gets you off to a good start. But as any one of us who've been in delivery know surprises will happen. There's not two ways about it. It is bound to happen at some point of time or the other. And the question is, how can you help that partner at that point when a surprise happens? And that's where we bring together partner success services, which is really where our professional services organization spends bulk of its time. So what it does is it makes itself available to be proactively injected into complex delivery engagements. So we can come and advise the partner and the customer on the architecture, on the roadmap, on certain technical nuances so that the delivery is really successful. And we try and avoid those surprises. The good news is a lot of this stuff really doesn't come with a high price point or at any price point for partners and customers. This is Google injecting itself with its partners to make sure delivery is successful. And today, in the world of gen AI where technology is changing so fast, in the world where security is the number one concern, being able to bring the best of Google and our experiences of delivering these complex programs across the world and making it available at each point of truth, let's say, is really where we spend a lot of time and effort on.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And really, I mean, it's been obvious... Obviously I've been tracking Google Cloud for the last decade and watching that growth, and it's been clear that there's been a goal of aggressively growing that cloud business and expanding partner ecosystem. We see that on a regular basis. And then that sales delivery, joint solution development focus, it's all very obvious and I think it's working for you.

Pallab Deb

>> It's working. I would say it's working partners seem to be... It resonates with partners. They see that this is truly partner focused company. We actually have a mandate internally that a hundred percent of our engagements have to have a partner on them, and it's kind of governed right at the top. So there's a high focus on partnerships and not just partnerships for the sake of a checkbox. Our field teams realize that, hey, we are built... Internally within Google, we are subscale in our ability to deliver. We need partners to deliver. People realize that Google isn't typically the destination for just lift and shift. People come to Google for transforming their businesses, which means you have to start with an innate understanding of the business on day zero. And you have to start with a good technical background so you can bring value quickly. Like we said, accelerate your time to value. That means that we engage early, we don't engage after a deal is closed, after a contract is signed, we try to bring in early. And this strategic partnership agreement really brings more intentionality and muscle around this whole process. It's like saying, "Hey, Persistent and Google, let's look at where we are headed for the next three years. Look at which accounts we want to target, which solutions we want to take to market, which markets do we want to penetrate and bring that early engagement into every facet of our motion."

Pallab Deb

>> Well, it's early engagement and strategy, that's obvious that it's really a strategic focus that's infusing everything that you're doing.

Pallab Deb

>> Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

>> Yeah, absolutely. So Ayon, I mean Persistent partnering with Google, as I mentioned earlier, is not a new thing. This is something like a 10 plus year collaboration. I'd love it if you would walk me through from your point of view, some highlights of that collaboration and maybe talk a little bit about the role that your ecosystem, your partner ecosystem at Persistent plays here.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Absolutely. Very happy to do that. Look, I think, so the hallmark of this partnership has been that we've been really keeping the client at the center of everything. And we've been constantly engaging with the tech disruption that the industry is looking at and saying that how do you take advantage of the tech disruption to the value of our clients? And to that extent, we've gone to the extent of building out centers of excellence across cloud. We've gone to the extent of building out data and AI and ML-based centers of excellence. We've even gone to the extent of making acquisitions of companies who were very focused on the Google Cloud ecosystem. And essentially what we did is when you look at choice points that are available to larger companies like us, once you acquire an organization, as you integrate them to an existing setup, I think, so what we've done is we've actually acquired a company. We got that in, which was a hundred percent Google Cloud focused company, and we made that the epicenter of all things Google Cloud within Persistent. So all of a sudden, rather than having four or five different businesses that we're all tailoring towards this bigger, broader tech stack, including Google Cloud being scattered across Persistent, we took all of that, put it into one view, and that view has being the one that's been really championing everything for us in Persistent. And I think that's been one of the core reasons why we stayed very focused in terms of building on this partnership and what was earlier more of here are 2, 3, 4 areas that we deal with, I think so now the nature of this partnership is much more expensive. It is cutting across all the verticals that we are playing in. It is no longer dominated by one or two countries, but it is now a global partnership. So everything from countries in Australia and New Zealand to Asia to the massively thriving startup ecosystem in India, to Europe, to North America, this partnership basically spreads its wings across all these spaces. So if you personally ask me what happens now that we have this strategic partnership agreement with Google, all we're saying is that continue to do the work that we've done for our clients in a handful of these geographies. But then take it rinse and replicate that, continue to play ahead of the curve, continue to have an early access to the technology that's coming up from Google Cloud, take it to our clients and help them solve some of the most complex problems that they're dealing with today.

>> I love it. And I don't-

Ayon Banerjee

>> That's .

>> I'm sorry?

Ayon Banerjee

>> Sorry, go ahead. Please go ahead.

>> No, well, my next question was just really going to be, Persistent is not an unknown company, but I would love for you to just hit on quickly on... Talk with us a little bit about Persistence's reputation, and the public cloud space and your delivery expertise chops. I think that plays kind of a significant role here.

Ayon Banerjee

>> So look, there are two sets of folks in the industry who look at you as a service provider and determine where do you lie in that continuum in terms of your maturity levels. One are of course our clients, in terms of the trust that they best throw upon the service provider. And the second is, of course, the analyst community. And if you look at it, let me just pick on the analyst community for a moment. So if you look at the analyst community, a few years back, we were just about a small dot in the cloud transformation space. But if you look at the strides that we've been making now on the back of all the work we are doing from cloud transformation standpoint, and when I say cloud transformation, I mean public cloud transformation, we've become a very strong credible challenger. Where we are fortunate to have now been ahead of some of our much larger tier one peers. Now, this wouldn't have happened by just us going and spreading collateral in the market, it's coming on the back of peer reviews, which means when the analyst is looking at publishing their overall, let me call it the magic quadrant right now. The magic quadrant is essentially getting feedback from our clients. The clients are coming in and saying that here's a partner which is agile, nimble, small enough to really care, large enough to scale and getting into the weeds of how do we really drive our cloud transformation journey, land that out, implement that, and then run it. And we do this again and again across all the industry vertical that we are playing in. So look, we are a small player, but having said that, we've also been growing dramatically. Just a few numbers for our audience, I think. So our revenue has been growing about 25% for the last five years in an industry that has been through COVID, in an industry, growth rates been negative, and we've been consistently growing. This is all on the back of the client trust that we've been earning. If you look at the values from a valuation perspective and a shareholder return standpoint, again, it's more than a triple digit growth from a shareholder return perspective over the last five years time. So I would say that look, I mean we are for the clients that we've worked with, we are a very trusted partner and they trust us on some of their most complex problems. And obviously as we continue to grow, we'll continue to bank on this partnership in terms of really helping us get into bigger, broader problems, problems which are longer term in terms of requiring to solve them. And I can only say that we are operating in a very complex and a reasonably challenging macro industry, and the overall economics are also rather challenging, but we continue to be fairly bullish on the back of the client deliveries that we are driving. And these partnerships, I mean the partnership with Google, which is as expensive as it is, will certainly play a very large role in terms of continuing this growth trajectory.

>> Yeah. Well, and you know what it all boils down to? Happy clients. When you deliver in a way that makes your clients happy, helps them be more successful, more profitable, grow at the speed that they want. I mean, that's really the magic. And so that's great to be a part of. So as we wrap this conversation, let's explore for a moment some of the broader IT services market trends. Pallab, what are you seeing out there in terms of... I mean, I think we touched on this just a few minutes ago, but buyer behavior is changing, buyer demand is changing. How are the market dynamics shifting?

Pallab Deb

>> Yeah, I think there's, like you said, a very pronounced change in what customers are looking for. And so that will not repeat that. So I think what that is doing is it's challenging us as a technology provider to be at the leading edge of making sure our technology is getting out there in a secure way. I amplify security so much over and over again because we are really hearing from our customers that they are worried about, "Hey, is the data leakage happening?" Is there an ability for them to convince their suppliers and customers that they can operate in a secure environment when they go to the cloud? And those things have become front and center. So you really look at how buying behaviors are changing and what the imperatives are thereof for everybody in the CPU system. Us as a hyperscaler, our SI partners or our ISV partners, it's all about making sure that the best of technologies is being brought to customers in a very secure way, in a way where the customers do have control of how they use that technology. They have the ability to initiate something, stop something, or restart something at their will and at their desire. And then they have from a viewpoint of a SI partner ecosystem, looking for people that can not just manage the technical complexity of what's on the table, but actually operated almost like a managed service. That's becoming a very important part. And where we are seeing this is people are actually constructing, let's say, deals or contracts where they're just not taking care of the technology estate, but they're taking care of the outcome that the business process is driving, underpinned by the technology estate. So especially let's say with generative AI, just let's throw an example with insurance as an example. It's not just about bringing in the technology for supporting your claims or your underwriting, but actually taking on a goal of seeing how you can make that process more efficient or reduce leakage and taking that as an outcome in your contract itself. And that means a really, really deep partnership and a really deep ability to understand technology and business process and manage that complexity for that customer as a whole.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I love it. I love it.

Ayon Banerjee

>> Maybe if I could just add something to what Pallab said.

>> Of course.

Ayon Banerjee

>> The other thing is that what we're seeing is now non-CIO functions are also starting to play a very active role in the decision-making lifecycle, right? Because it is all stemming from a business problem that they're trying to solve. The CIO is obviously facilitating the solve of that problem. So if you look at us, I mean, as a service provider, our conversations are now going way beyond just tech. Our conversations are starting at business and then getting down to the tech stack and then getting down to the implementation of that tech stack. I would say that's another very clear shift that we are seeing. So while the CIO and the CTO organization continues to be integral to all of this, but on the demand side, you're starting to see multiple buying personas that are coming into the picture. And that is also helping us get much more expensive on the one hand and sharper on the other in terms of truly solving that enterprise level problem.

>> Well, I came into this conversation knowing that it was going to be fantastic. You gentlemen did not disappoint. It's clear that the strategic partnership between Persistence Systems and Google Cloud is exactly the kind of innovative collaboration that the market needs today to meet the evolving demands of the IT services market. And I see this combination, this combination of resources and expertise between Persistence Systems and Google really, really serves to position you so well to deliver for clients. And I think we've talked about this fostering innovation, driving growth, really helping clients be more competitive. All of this I think is an important part of the equation. And I think what customers are looking for is help navigating this rapidly changing landscape of enterprise IT services. So I love this collaboration. I think that it's solving for many, many customers, and I think that there are great things ahead for both of you. Ayon Banerjee, chief strategy and growth officer at Persistence Systems, Pallab Deb, managing director SI and industry go-to-market partnerships at Google Cloud. You've been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today, for sharing news of this collaboration between your companies. And I am guessing there will be good things ahead for both of you and for your customers as a result. And to our audience, thank you for joining us here at theCUBE, your source for enterprise and emerging tech news. I'm Shelley Kramer, and we'll see you next time.