The cloud computing landscape is changing at a rapid pace, thanks to innovations in tools, technologies and services. For most organizations, moving to the cloud offers many benefits, such as more flexibility and efficiency, lower IT costs and enhanced security. But becoming a cloud-first business isn’t easy — in fact, it’s often complex work that requires an experienced team of skilled professionals.

“We’re seeing many organizations struggle with finding the right skills, managing the complexities of their hybrid environment and getting their arms around disparate systems and disconnected data,” said Annemarie Dev, Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances for Google Cloud at Kyndryl. “While digital transformation is a top priority for most companies, many leaders have not been able to modernize at the rate and pace needed. There are concerns including disruption of existing business, impact to customer experience, security and cost optimization.”

That’s why it’s important for companies to choose a trusted service provider that understands the customer’s vision for the future, and has the technical expertise and experience needed to enable impactful business outcomes, noted Dev.

In 2021, Kyndryl and Google Cloud partnered to accelerate customers’ digital transformations and help their businesses to become more advanced, data-driven and sustainable. Since then, Kyndryl has been building competencies, offerings and solutions on Google Cloud. Kyndryl has thousands of Google Cloud certified experts and many complex IT projects underway or already completed.

As Google Cloud Next'23 — an in-person event in San Francisco highlighting the tech company’s advancements in artificial intelligence, data and security, as well as product roadmaps — gets underway, Dev speaks about the momentum behind Kyndryl’s alliance with Google Cloud.

How is Kyndryl growing its Google Cloud expertise?

Investing in skills and capacity is an ongoing priority. In order to be the trusted partner and advisor for our customers, we need to have the right skills, industry knowledge and experience to be able to help our customers tackle their biggest challenges. Kyndryl now has a global talent base with over 5,300 Google Cloud certifications, and we are continuing to pursue advanced certifications in the areas our customers care about most. We’ve delivered more than 25,000 IT modernization projects and programs globally. Kyndryl’s experts have completed over 500,000 workload, server and network migrations for our customers.

Kyndryl is a Premier Partner of Google Cloud. We have achieved 31 Google Partner Expertises globally, and recently achieved the Google Cloud Client Infrastructure Specialization for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). That’s in addition to having Cloud Migration Specialization for EMEA and Latin America. Partner Specialization is the highest technical designation a partner can achieve. These achieved specializations indicate to our customers that we have strong technical proficiency and have demonstrated delivery excellence with Google Cloud — that we’ve successfully put into practice services and solutions that solve real problems. It also means that our customers know we can help them solve their toughest technology challenges.

Talk a little about how Kyndryl and Google Cloud are developing joint solutions.

Kyndryl, with Google, is taking a data-first aproach to our joint solutions. We are working with our customers as they transform from legacy systems to cloud native. For example, we are jointly working with customers to modernize their mainframe applications. The modernization approach includes integrating mainframe applications with Google Cloud and migrating applications from the mainframe to Google Cloud. Kyndryl solutions with Google Cloud span advisory, project and managed services.

How is Kyndryl being recognized for this progress?

The measure of our progress is the success of our customers. That’s the metric that matters most. That being said, external recognition provides additional validation that we are focused on the right strategy to deliver meaningful business outcomes for our customers. We are very excited for our customers Carrefour Belgium and GPA, who won Google Cloud Customer Awards in the retail category for their technology modernization projects to Google Cloud. This is great recognition of the transformative work and results that our team helped enable for these customers.

I am also thrilled that Kyndryl was selected as a Talent Development Partner of the Year — Latin America.

What’s next for Kyndryl and Google Cloud?

Customer success is at the heart of everything we do — it is our guiding principle. Together, we are solving our customer’s evolving challenges and partnering for progress. We are focused on accelerating digital transformation for our customers in a way that reduces risk and complexity, that empowers impactful business outcomes with expertise, speed, innovation and trust.