Relieve IT Administrators

At first, the public cloud was a great way to perform the same IT tasks of the past in a cheaper and more scalable fashion.

But that's no longer enough, Brian Stephens, VP of cloud platforms, told attendees at Google Cloud Platform Live.

Solution providers need to "relieve IT administrators," Stephens said, not just give them the same choices in a different package.

"The generation one of the public cloud is fantastic, but it's largely been about moving a virtual machine into someone else's data center," Stephens said.

Successful channel partners must now leverage the power of the cloud to greatly simplify provisioning of resources, IT management, system updates and maintenance, and application deployments.

The CIO will be grateful.