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Why Better Technology Does Not Win Hyperscaler Partnerships with Alan Chhabra

12m 40s

Why Better Technology Does Not Win Hyperscaler Partnerships with Alan Chhabra

This episode of Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon, features Alan Chabra, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebrus Systems. Before joining Cerebrus, Chabra spent nearly a decade building MongoDB's global partner ecosystem, where partners touched more than 80% of new business. In today's AI market, hyperscaler partnerships can determine whether an infrastructure company reaches customers at scale, but Chabra explains that winning them takes more than strong technology. Drawing on his MongoDB experience, Chabra describes how hyperscalers were offering their own open-source data services while bringing in players like MongoDB, Elastic, and Redis as partners. He emphasizes that leaders must understand a partner's internal priorities, competitive pressures, power structure, and existing investments, comparing AWS's organization to Game of Thrones, with multiple kingdoms spanning the Amazon parent and the AWS subsidiary. Success also demands political capacity—looking beyond a single deal or relationship to the broader landscape. One key tactic was partnering with Alibaba in China, which pressured AWS and Azure to engage more seriously. Cerebrus applied the same playbook by aligning its architecture with AWS Trainium to compete with Nvidia, neutralizing competitive threats and creating value for both sides.

Transcription

587 Words, 3294 Characters

English
Speaker 1Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Alan Chabra is the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebrus Systems. Before joining Cerebrus, he spent nearly a decade building MongoDB's global partner ecosystem, where partners touched more than 80% of new business. In today's AI market, hyperscaler partnerships can determine whether an infrastructure company reaches customers at scale. In this clip, Alan explains why winning those partnerships takes more than strong technology. Leaders must understand the partner's internal priorities, competitive pressures, power structure, and existing investments. He breaks down how Cerebrus aligned its architecture with AWS Tranium and why the strongest partner strategies create value for both sides without ignoring the politics inside the account. Let's dive in. So at MongoDB,
Speaker 2we had a challenge with the hyperscalers. At the time, for folks who are listening who are in the data space in the 2015 to 20 area, they'll know what I'm talking about. For folks that weren't, it's okay. But the hyperscalers were offering their own open source data as a service. And they were bringing in all the open source players like MongoDB and Elastic and React. And they were bringing in all the open source players. so i do that all the time i mean andrew did that with me right so when i joined cerebras hey actually i don't know if he asked me but i just showed it to him let me show you the power base of these brilliant people at aws and what you realize is it's like um game of thrones there's five kingdoms six kingdoms oh good some kingdoms work for the parent for amazon all the way up to andy jassy and others work for the subsidiary aws up to matt garman and within aws there's different components as well right there's great leaders like dave brown like prasad like swami like ruba like greg pearson so it's not about being superhuman but i do respect that um what john's saying like we had to learn a lot at mongo the hard way but it's about doing your research and all these
Speaker 3you also have to have political capacity meaning you can't look at one deal or one relationship you're not yeah if
Speaker 2you look at one deal by itself you never get it so what john didn't tell you at mongo one of the ways we cracked in the hyperscalers was not just partnering with their competitor we partnered with alibaba in china so both you guys know we had a great leader who worked for me uh steve sue in china so i was on a plane to um beijing guanzhou shenzhen i think i went like seven times okay while i was there and we got we cracked into alibaba and the last thing aws or azure wanted was mongol to be to have a great partnership with the chinese before we had a good one with them too so same thing in this new world right when we crocked in aws we embraced tranium tranium plus cerebrus to compete with nvidia a lot of neutralization of enemies if you can do something like that
Speaker 4thanks for listening to today's episode if you enjoy the content please subscribe rate and review the show to help us reach more people this show is brought to you by force management where we help companies improve sales performance executing the growth strategy at the point of sale check out forcemanagement.com for more information

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Alan Chabra is Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebrus Systems, having previously built MongoDB's global partner ecosystem for nearly a decade.
  2. At MongoDB, hyperscalers were offering their own open-source data services while onboarding open-source players like MongoDB, Elastic, and Redis as partners.
  3. Winning hyperscaler partnerships requires understanding the partner's internal priorities, competitive pressures, power structure, and existing investments—not just strong technology.
  4. Chabra compares AWS's internal structure to Game of Thrones, with multiple kingdoms spanning the Amazon parent organization and the AWS subsidiary with its own leaders.
  5. Success requires political capacity
  6. MongoDB cracked the hyperscalers partly by partnering with Alibaba in China, which pressured AWS and Azure to engage more seriously.
  7. Cerebrus applied the same playbook by aligning its architecture with AWS Trainium to compete with Nvidia, neutralizing competitive threats.

Summary:

This episode of Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon, features Alan Chabra, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebrus Systems. Before joining Cerebrus, Chabra spent nearly a decade building MongoDB's global partner ecosystem, where partners touched more than 80% of new business. In today's AI market, hyperscaler partnerships can determine whether an infrastructure company reaches customers at scale, but Chabra explains that winning them takes more than strong technology.

Drawing on his MongoDB experience, Chabra describes how hyperscalers were offering their own open-source data services while bringing in players like MongoDB, Elastic, and Redis as partners. He emphasizes that leaders must understand a partner's internal priorities, competitive pressures, power structure, and existing investments, comparing AWS's organization to Game of Thrones, with multiple kingdoms spanning the Amazon parent and the AWS subsidiary. Success also demands political capacity—looking beyond a single deal or relationship to the broader landscape.

One key tactic was partnering with Alibaba in China, which pressured AWS and Azure to engage more seriously. Cerebrus applied the same playbook by aligning its architecture with AWS Trainium to compete with Nvidia, neutralizing competitive threats and creating value for both sides.

FAQs

Alan Chabra is the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships at Cerebrus Systems. Before that, he spent nearly a decade building MongoDB's global partner ecosystem.

The clip focuses on how to win hyperscaler partnerships in the AI market. Alan explains that success requires understanding the partner's priorities, politics, and competitive pressures, not just strong technology.

Alan compares hyperscalers like AWS to Game of Thrones, with multiple kingdoms and power structures. Leaders must understand who reports to whom and where decisions are made to build effective partnerships.

MongoDB partnered with Alibaba in China as a competitive move. This created urgency for AWS and Azure to build a strong partnership with MongoDB too.

Cerebrus aligned its architecture with AWS Tranium to compete with Nvidia. Alan describes this as neutralizing enemies by creating value for both sides.

Political capacity means looking beyond a single deal or relationship. You need to understand the broader landscape of alliances and competition to succeed with hyperscalers.

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Transcription

587 words