The Co-Build Era: How Partners Are Moving from Services to Solutions 

Rajat Kohli: Welcome to another episode of the Zinnov podcast series. I’m Rajat Kohli, working in the capacity of partner with Zinnov, and I take care of the relationship working with the hyperscalers as well as large and mid-size I-suites. Here today, we have Jason McIntyre, Vice President for Scale Partnerships at Databricks. I’m looking forward to having a very interesting conversation with him about how the evolution of the partner ecosystem looks. Great to have you, Jason, today.

Jason McIntyre: It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Rajat Kohli: Awesome. This is great. So, let’s deep dive into the discussion. As you’re taking care of the SI ecosystem, I would say that you would agree with me that there’s a lot of evolution and acceleration in the SI persona, the system integrator persona, how the capability as well as the capacity of the system integrator has evolved over the last few years. Do you want to throw some light on that, what you have seen in your world?

Jason McIntyre: Yeah, I think maybe what you’re referring to is really the idea of system integrators evolving into more than just service providers, but also solution providers. The way in which they’re bringing their own thought leadership, maybe some intellectual property, maybe converting some of, as a former, recovering consultant, I guess is what some people say, maybe converting some of, as a former consultant, recovering consultant. We used to call it methodology, but I think we’re seeing a lot of those service providers today really transferring that methodology into intellectual property: more tooling, more assets, and really trying to find ways to go to market with a solution, a solution that is addressing a true business need and delivering business value. So, I think that’s maybe what you’re hinting at there, and I would agree. We see all our partners and all of the friends that we have in the services business today are all trying to evolve to something at a higher order like that.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting. And if you see today’s world, data and AI are a big talk. In that world there’s a lot of capability and maturity needed from the consulting and the system integrators. For you, what are the critical ingredients, from a data and AI lens, to make a partnership between the ISV and the partner ecosystem successful?

Jason McIntyre: I think for me the number one thing I always go back to when it comes to partnership success is having a partnership mentality. I think we have a lot of folks that come to the partnership conversation who have a point of view that they’d like to see this partnership, or their partnerships, work at a much more strategic level. They like to throw around buzzwords about ways in which executive sponsors and business sponsors are going to line up, they’re going to invest, and we’re going to do things at a more strategic level. For me, what I think is a more appropriate way to start these conversations, or really the better approach to the effort, is to ensure that you always maintain a partner mentality. It’s to make sure that as an organization or as an individual you’re committed to the idea that, look, every day when I wake up I’m going to see if I can do more for my partner than my partner’s going to do for me today. I’m going to give more than I can get, and I’m going to trust that I’ve made the right decisions to invest in the right partnerships, and that I’m going to get a return on that. For me, I think that’s one of the ways in which I like to see our best partners, our most mature partners, really try to work through some of that.
Second thing I always like to point out to our partners is to differentiate themselves. We’re blessed from a Databricks standpoint, we’ve got a very large ecosystem today, and so I can speak to where we are today. With over 5,000 partners, I think it’s really important for our partners to find a way to differentiate themselves. Again, I talked about investing in some of the resources or the assets that they create. I think it’s important for our partners to own that part of the process and to really think about how they’re going to differentiate themselves, and not just be another “me too” partner that’s providing maybe migration services or modernization services generically, but how are you differentiating yourself and being relevant in a specific industry and providing something that is connected to a business user?
And, I guess lastly, I always like to talk about best practices. I do think that as much as you want to be different, there are certain things that you really need to do to be a valued member of a partner ecosystem. You may have the luxury working with some smaller, new partners, new technology providers, where you can maybe step in and create something unique. But I think what you’re going to find working with many technology providers or ISVs that are maybe more mature in their ecosystems is that you really do need to figure out how to play that game, right? And whatever the way in which that partner program has been set up, you kind of need to own your journey through it and make sure you’re following some of the best practices that they’ve lined up, whether that’s around getting training and certifications, whether that’s creating solutions and going to market with those solutions, or whether it’s the way in which you engage in the field and really get recognized for the impact you’re having. I would highlight those three things as kind of ways in which I see some of our best partners engaging today in a more mature way.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting. So, Jason, I think you touched upon that as of today, there are more than 5,000 partners in the Databricks ecosystem, and every day, more partners are onboarded. What differentiated value do you see in the next set of partners, which could be small or regional? What do you see in those partner personas?

Jason McIntyre: Yeah, I think what we’re going to see in the next set of partners that come into our ecosystem and the way they’re going to differentiate themselves is going to be based on their expertise, and it’s probably most likely in a specific industry, right? Those are probably the partners that are not in our ecosystem today. Today a lot of the largest global system integrators are part of our ecosystem. We’ve got all the pure-play data analytics and service providers in our ecosystem. We’ve even got a really strong stable of Databricks only partners in our ecosystem today. But I think where we’re missing out is probably in some of those partners that are more niche into specific industries. As we become more relevant to business users inside industries, I think we’re going to find those are the type of service providers that are going to start coming into our ecosystem. That’s where I’m interested. I’m excited about the opportunity to work with more partners with that type of profile.

Rajat Kohli: Understood. And you touched upon industry. Verticalization is going to be one of the key aspects in the future and how strong the partners are in a specific industry. How much value does that bring to the table?

Jason McIntyre: 99% of it. I’m sure there’s the relationship, there’s the capability, there’s the experience. But no doubt, like I said, we find ourselves as a technology product trying to evolve out of conversations with CIOs and CTOs, even chief data officers. As we find ourselves working with chief business officers or other leaders of business, we need to be talking about industry. I think it’s absolutely imperative for us to be working through the industry side of things going forward.

Rajat Kohli: Sure. And to enable the partners there’s a lot of investment being done in training and certification, partner enablement itself; in some words you call it co-market, co-build, as well as co-selling initiatives. How do you see, or what could be, the next version of these investments? Over the next few years, will investments in training and certification suffice, or do we need to look at any new element that will enable and accelerate the partner’s journey?

Jason McIntyre: That’s a very good question. I do think where everybody wants to get to, the pinnacle, is going to be not just investment in co-marketing and training; it’s going to be two things. It’s going to be an investment in co-development. Databricks is going to continue to invest in its platform and its technology, but there’s always going to be areas on the fringe where we’re going to maybe have that on our roadmap, but maybe it’s on page two of the roadmap, or maybe it never makes it on the roadmap. We would absolutely love for another service provider to come in and try to build a solution around that. We’d love to see that. And I think the other thing is just to be a higher evolution from a go-to-market standpoint. There are certainly some more opportunistic ways in which partners can work together to create opportunities in the market, and then there are more proactive ways that we can do that. That’s what I’d like to see: a higher evolution from a go-to-market standpoint with our partners.

Rajat Kohli: Sure. And I see that in the industry there’s a shift happening from the large enterprises to the mid-market. Along with the shift in our investments in technology, we see, and it’s a voice in the ecosystem, that the shift is also happening from the GSIs to the next set of system integrators. How do you see that shift happening?

Jason McIntyre: Maybe I don’t have as much visibility into this one, but what I’ve picked up in the marketplace is that many of the largest GSIs out there have found that the business is more commoditized. It’s not as big of a growth opportunity for them, so they’re struggling to maintain that as a core part of their business, while many other more niche providers are able to come in. Maybe not selling the multi-billion, multi-year type of deal, but picking off pieces of it where they can do it better. But that’s all purely anecdotal, some of the things that I’ve heard kind of deal-by-deal, but I don’t know if I’ve got a good insight into a market trend on that one.

Rajat Kohli: That’s fine. The other aspect that we are looking at is the trend from POC to production. The proof-of-concept to production, we see that the success rate is on the lower side, but investments are being done on the right side. What do you think could change so that the success rate is higher?

Jason McIntyre: I think one area could be to think about making the right investments up front. A lot of people are trying to do the POC on the cheap, and they’re trying to figure out a way to do these things without the education, without the right resources, or access to the right data. So, if you want to see some of these POCs move into production faster, I think you’ve got to be a little more committed to wanting to see those POCs be successful. If you go into the POC kind of almost wishing it to fail or wanting to see if it can overcome some of these higher hurdles, then you’re going to be challenged with that. I think for me I’d like to see people invest more in their POCs to do that. Maybe, I’ve said it differently too. I don’t think we want to see people doing more POCs. I’d rather be working with some of our service providers to try to get out of the POC mentality and get into the let’s do a demo, let’s show you how your data that work stream can be done today. Getting out of a kind of POC mode altogether and just getting into a faster time to production.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting. Based on our analysis, we have seen the trend of lines of business becoming the new CIOs. In this journey it’s very important that the partner ecosystem is ready to have those kinds of conversations with the lines of business outside of the CIOs. Are other partners of today’s world ready to have those conversations, or do they need support on the industry playbook aligned to the use cases?

Jason McIntyre: Great question. My first reaction is going to be yes, they are. That’s who they are. They’re ready to have those conversations more than the technology providers, like Databricks, can have those conversations. But as you finish that question, you’re right: there’s a lot that technology providers like Databricks can do to continue to ensure that the right enablement is in place. I do think that’s a challenge, especially in a market that’s so innovative and moving so fast today. It is really challenging not only to educate your customers and your own organization, but we’re also working hard to make sure that we think about the partners inside of that as well. That we don’t line that up and make that sequential. How do we do that all-in-one motion? Let’s make sure that our field, our customers, and our partners are all being educated and getting access to our innovation as quickly as possible.

Rajat Kohli: In today’s world, Jason, there’s a lot of focus on data and AI. Everyone is looking for the return on investment and how customers can benefit in terms of the money they’re investing in the technology. At the same time, platform providers like Databricks are looking for the return on investment in partner initiatives also. How do you see that? What is the way forward for this?

Jason McIntyre: Sure. I think there are two questions in there: one on the customer side and then on the partner side. From a customer standpoint, we’ve invested in a team that really helps our customers understand the return on investment they’re getting from a Databricks standpoint. That’s becoming critically important as we become a bigger line item in the budget of our customers. It’s critically important for them to understand as a buyer and as a sponsor of our relationship what the cost-benefit is of working with Databricks. Understanding what kind of new business value they’re getting from Databricks, but then also understanding the productivity they’re gaining. That’s what we find important when working with Databricks today: allowing data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to be able to do their job faster and better. All these things coming together, that’s where we think the return on equity, return on investment is coming from, or how we try to articulate it.

It’s always fun to tell some of our customer stories and many of them are publicly available. We’re talking millions of dollars when you combine savings with new business value and even some of the ways teams are quantifying the productivity they’re gaining. Now, when I think about the return on investment from a partner program standpoint, that is always an age-old question. That’s a little harder from a partner standpoint. It’s an indirect return oftentimes because ultimately what you’re getting from investing in a partner ecosystem or in a specific partner is better collaboration in the field, better return from your customers, or more adoption in the marketplace. One of the things we really try to do is make sure our partners are engaging in our field, and that our field is the one, whether it’s sales, account executives, or our field solution architects, we want to make sure they’re recognizing the impact of our partners. So the best way we have to really recognize that return on investment in our partner ecosystem is when our field teams, our sellers, are telling us about the impact partners are having on their ability to serve customers. For us, that’s the most important thing we can look to do as Databricks, an organization that has its sights set on being a much larger organization. Our growth is dependent upon the ability of our service providers, the partners in our ecosystem, to engage in almost all the implementations we have. Some of our best, largest customers like to self-implement. that’s great. But we recognize that most large enterprises are looking for their trusted advisors to help them with these things.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting. I think the other aspect is what we hear from partners and platform companies is the clear understanding between partner-influenced revenue and partner-sourced revenue, in a particular deal, how involved is a partner and how do we categorize it as either of these two? Is the industry able to solve that, or is that a question mark? What needs to be done going forward?

Jason McIntyre: I think that’s a question that will continue to persist in the market. It’s very dependent upon the maturity of the service provider and their partner program, the maturity of the ISV or technology provider and their partner program. It has a lot to do with the leadership in place and how they think about or recognize the role of an ecosystem in their ability to do things. For me personally, I’ve been in the field long enough to see things come and go very much in a cyclical manner as far as how things are thought about in these ways. I’ve always tried to stay as much above that as I can and recognize that. Again, for me, having a partner mentality, as long as I can help our SI partners grow their business, if they’ve got a healthy pipeline and if they’re working on a healthy amount of delivery work today, I know I can trust that. I’m getting them to follow best practices and engage with us in the field. I can trust that the scoreboard will take care of itself, as they say in the sports world. So we’re going to keep doing all the right things as a partner team and let some of the scoreboard matters work themselves out.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting that you touched upon the sports industry. What are two or three key skill sets or learnings that you want to borrow from the sports industry into the partnership ecosystem?

Jason McIntyre: One thing has got to be compete, right? You have to compete to win. You have to wake up every day thinking that you can win. Don’t ever concede a meeting, a call, an email, right? You need to always be trying to position your capabilities and the opportunity that your organization or this partnership represents. I think that’s number one, you want to think about champions in the sports world, right? There’s no days off. And I think that is critically important to an organization like Databricks that’s kind of still in this hyper, growth mode, that absolutely is part of our mentality day in, day out. The other one I always like to think about is the importance of practice, right? The idea that practice doesn’t make perfect, but perfect practice makes perfect. I definitely like to think about being prepared for anything that my team is part of. It’s making sure we work with each other to practice what we’re doing to be ready to meet the expectations of our partners and make sure we’re there to help them in their journey.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting. You touched upon practice, and I can relate that another important aspect is the skill set of the individual team members working in the partner community, how it has evolved with the evolution of these emerging technologies and the maturity of the technology. Do you see that going forward it’s going to change further? What skill sets are needed in the partner community, like the system integrator and consulting partners aligned to your product portfolio?

Jason McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. I think in this space innovation is going to continue to outpace anything we’ve seen before.

So the need for service providers to continue to evolve and keep up with that pace is going to be critically important. Their customers, our customers, they’re not going to be able to do that. So they’re absolutely going to be dependent upon service providers in the market to continue to provide those services. Given where we are today and the topics we’re talking about, you can’t not think about how generative AI and agentic systems, or whatever the next buzzword will be in that field, is going to impact the way service providers build and staff their business. I think one of the things that’s interesting is that a lot of people in services organizations earned their way up that ladder by doing many of the small things that needed to be done right. They needed to learn how to listen to requirements. They needed to learn how to project-manage and program-manage the efforts that were underway. I just think it’d be really interesting to see how agentic systems disrupt those roles that are kind of entry-level roles inside consulting organizations, how agentic systems really disrupt that lifecycle and that pipeline of skills and talent and leadership that comes into services organizations. That’s how I think about the evolution of that.

Rajat Kohli: That’s interesting. I’ll put the last question. You spoke about how the partner community is evolving, but looking at your side, the partner leaders like you, what is the playbook for partner leaders going forward? As we see maturity in workload, technology, and industry, what is the playbook for partner leaders like you?

Jason McIntyre: Yeah. I hope we get to focus more on inspiration and education. I think especially when you’re at an organization that’s growing as fast as Databricks, and I know every organization is growing fast, there’s definitely a tendency to want to lean in and not just be a leader or a coach, but to be a player: to get on the field and get your jersey dirty a little too. As we do that, we kind of have more of a lead-by-example approach versus really being able to come in and help our team with more inspiration, more education, and more vision. That helps individuals get inspired and helps our partners and customers see that same inspiration. So for me that’s what I think is becoming more and more compelling for at least a leader like me. But I think about those folks that are my leaders, and I think it’s really about making sure that our executive leadership sees the opportunity to continue to invest in partners in new ways. Like we talked about, we’ve had a long conversation here about innovation, that innovation is not limited to just technology. It’s also limited to the ways in which partnerships can be built and evolve. That requires investment at certain times, whether that’s in people that have new skills that maybe aren’t on the team today, or whether it’s in programs that require more funding. Those programs need to differentiate themselves from some of the things that, as a technology provider, your competitors are doing in the market.

Rajat Kohli: This is interesting. Jason, let’s do a quick rapid fire with you. How has AI transformed you as an individual?

Jason McIntyre: I don’t feel like it’s transformed me yet, other than in maybe the vision that I’m going to have for the future and how the future’s shaped. I don’t feel like it’s had an impact on me yet today, but it’s impacting the way I think about the future.

Rajat Kohli: Interesting. As you’re like a sports lover, what if AI is running the entire show on the different matches? Would you love it?

Jason McIntyre: No, that’s not what’s, sports is to me, right? Sports is about seeing people who have either been blessed with a little more talent, but the truth is they’ve worked harder. It’s fun to watch people compete and do things that way. No, I would not want to see any sporting match determined based on probable statistics of who should win or who could win.

Rajat Kohli: How has AI disrupted industry? What could be the next technology that you can think of?

Jason McIntyre: I think it’ll be just kind of the continued evolution. You just use the word “generative AI”, and already generative AI is not what people talk about, they talk about agentic systems. Before that it was just AI; before that it was data science. So I just think it’s going to be a continued evolution of that thread. I’m not capable of dreaming big enough to think about what else could come, flying cars and some of that stuff. I’ll let that happen and I’ll observe it. I’m not going to dream it.

Rajat Kohli: And what is your advice to the graduates, the new college graduates coming into the ecosystem?

Jason McIntyre: Yeah. Look, be prepared to work hard. One of the things I said earlier in our discussion: you have to figure out what differentiates you. You need to pursue what you want to do and what you want to do differently. If you let enterprises or the world shape what you are, they will accept that and they will use you, but you will not find yourself in a sustainable career. Challenge yourself to always be doing new things and pursue those new things.

Rajat Kohli: Awesome. This is great. Thank you so much for your time.

Jason McIntyre: Thank you, Rajat. It was a pleasure.

Rajat Kohli: Thank you.