The expansion of their relationship with Google Cloud gives Redis Labs what they believe will be multiple ways to significantly sales for both themselves and their partner ecosystem.
Rod Hamlin, Vice President, Global Alliances and Strategic Partnerships, Redis Labs
Open source NoSQL in-memory database provider Redis Labs has announced that their Redis Enterprise commercial application is now available as a managed service on the Google Cloud. While Redis Labs is already an established player in their space, they see their expanded partnership with Google as likely to have monumental impact for themselves as well as their channel partners.
Redis Enterprise is a high-performance, in-memory multi-model database. It supports native data structures, probabilistic data-structure, streams, document, graph, time series, AI, and search, in order to power high-speed transactions, recommendation engines, data ingest and other instant experience use cases. It is widely used by large enterprises in areas like credit card processing, gaming and retail who need a highly scalable database to maintain service levels.
This news was originally announced back in April at the Google Cloud Next ‘19 event in San Francisco, where Google Cloud announced strategic partnerships with multiple open source-centric companies in the areas of data management and analytics
“At Google Cloud Next, they announced their partnering with Red Labs, one of the initial three partnerships they made in our area,” said Rod Hamlin, Vice President, Global Alliances and Strategic Partnerships at Redis Labs. “We had our CEO, Ofer Bengal, there, and he stood with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian onstage, and they gave a demo. They announced that Google Cloud will make Redis Enterprise available as a native Google managed service. Customers will get their unified bill from Google, and it feels like a native Google service.”
Now that services has reached General Availability. It lets Redis Enterprise Cloud be purchased through the Google Cloud Marketplace as an on-demand service metered by per-minute usage. It also improves ease of use for Redis customers, and they can now leave the operational overhead of installing and managing Redis Enterprise Cloud to Google.
Hamlin expects the impact of this to be huge for Redis Labs, as well as for their partner ecosystem.
“From our perspective, we think this is massive,” he said. “We see it escalating significantly. It gives us an ability to engage with the Google Enterprise team as a small 400-person company. Now we go into deals with the Google team, or they can even go in without us. Google sales reps can sell and get full credit.
“We announced the GA, and closed a significant deal three days later,” Hamlin noted.
“The two big keys for us with this is that it’s fully integrated so it’s a very comfortable buying process for customer, and that it gives the customer the ability to burn off credits,” Hamlin added. “They have financial commitments with Google Cloud, so they need to find services that drive consumption so the sellers get paid. We do that for them.”
Redis Labs also has strong partnerships with the other very large cloud providers.
“We have a fantastic relationship with Azure, and a more deeper expansion of that is upcoming shortly,” Hamlin said. “AWS is one that we partner with, and also compete with. We have been in the AWS marketplace for a long time. Their ElastiCache is based on our open source product.”
Redis has a multi-channel approach to going to market. They have a direct sales team, and five strategic vendor partners – four if you consider VMware and Pivotal to be one. Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry has always been central to Redis, and the two companies just announced a new jointly developed solution, which will provide an easy integration of Redis Enterprise as a native service on PKS. Red Hat is another critical partner for Redis.
“We have important reseller partnerships as well,” Hamlin said. “This includes strategic partnerships with the big GSIs and as well as with regional GSIs. We have a huge reseller network now in Latin America. We also have distribution partners like SHI and Softchoice.”
