Chapter 6: “Forging Alliances: Seven Doctrines for Winning the Cloud Wars”

Alejandro Canonero
May 6
5 min read

Updated: May 9

“Steampunk battlefield of cloud empires—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—linked by alliances and flanked by the seven doctrines of Chapter 6 Forging Alliances from War of the Ecosystems.” — “Steampunk battlefield of cloud empires—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—linked by alliances and flanked by the seven doctrines of Chapter 6 *Forging Alliances* from *War of the Ecosystems*.”

In the cloud arena—where Amazon, Microsoft, and Google loom like rival Empires and SaaS vendors thunder between them like armoured cavalry—features alone no longer decide the spoils. Victory falls to the commander who forges the strongest alliances.

Chapter 6 of War of the Ecosystems (“Forging Alliances: Building a Thriving Ecosystem”) sets out seven doctrines for that brand of warfare.

Below, I expand each doctrine into a flowing campaign narrative—why it matters, what it truly demands, and how it has just been executed on the frontline—peppered with war-room anecdotes, competitive stumbles, and hard numbers that prove the doctrine’s firepower.

1 | Securing the Supply-Lines — Ecosystem Dynamics

I still recall a winter dawn in our London war-room, poring over latency graphs that spiked red every time our partner’s network hit peak load. We drew one conclusion: until supply lines are pooled, every grand strategy is built on sand.

Why? An army that outruns its logistics bleeds dry; a partner programme run as a quarterly revenue stunt is a column of soldiers fed on biscuits.

What? Chapter 6 demands shared road-maps, mirrored support desks, and mutual P&L accountability.

How? At Google Cloud Next ’25, Cisco embedded SD-WAN natively on Google’s Cloud WAN backbone. Latency plunged by up to 40 % and total cost of ownership by a matching 40 %—proof that a joint supply line can tilt an entire theatre of operations Google Cloud.

Where rivals faltered?

Oracle’s multi-cloud pitch still shuttles traffic across the public internet, incurring the very jitter Google and Cisco just eradicated. Customers notice the difference.

2 | Rallying the Ranks — Partner Tiering & Incentives

When A Top Cloud Platform briefed me privately last November, their slide read: “Morale is a force multiplier.” I nodded; Chapter 6 Hammers the same point.

Why? Without a visible ladder of advancement, partners drift—or worse, defect.

What? A precious-metal hierarchy must offer progressively richer bounties: MDF, co-sell credits, roadmap visibility.

How? i.e., AWS declared that from January 2025 every ISV Accelerate cohort in Marketplace would receive full SaaS co-sell privileges. Partners using these motions now report 51 % higher revenue growth, 65 % higher close rates, and 54 % larger deals—stats born of the Canalys study AWS trumpeted at re: Invent Amazon Web Services, Inc..

Where rivals faltered? Google’s erstwhile Premier tier once required arbitrary head-count thresholds; smaller but potent ISVs simply walked away.

3 | Drilling the Combat Units — Role Clarity

During a 2021 data-centre migration, two systems integrators and an MSP brawled over who owned cut-over scripts. We lost forty-eight hours of runway. Chapter 6 brands that chaos “friendly fire”.

Why? Overlapping duties stall deployments and drain goodwill.

What? Carve the ecosystem into combat units—platform heavy artillery, SI combat-engineers, MSP logistics corps.

How? Microsoft’s Copilot certifications did just that: SIs graduate as AI Architects, while specialist educators run change-management boot camps. Results? More than 230,000 organisations (including 90 % of the Fortune 500) have used Copilot Studio, and customers created 1 million custom agents this quarter, double the previous period CRN.

Where rivals faltered? IBM’s Watsonx roll-out blurred the line between integrator and trainer; early pilots stalled as each waited for the other.

4 | Command by the Numbers — Governance & Shared Metrics

I once asked a partner executive how success was measured. He gestured at an Awards & trophy cabinet. “Beautiful,” I replied, “but how many customers renewed last quarter?” He changed the subject.

Why? Grandeur without measurement mutates into parade-ground theatre.

What? Quarterly war-councils, ARR-pegged credits, and an executive field-marshal on each side.

How? AWS’s 2025 overhaul of the Well-Architected Partner Programme welded enablement credits to captured ARR and made executive sponsorship compulsory for Premier colours.

Where rivals faltered? GCP’s erstwhile “Expert Partner” badge offered prestige but no quotas; predictably, performance atrophied.

5 | Forging Tomorrow’s Weapons — Co-innovation & Shared IP

The most electric moment of my career was watching two engineers—one in Tel Aviv, one in Dublin—jointly ship a patent the lawyers had said was “too complicated to share.” We shipped it anyway.

Why? Surface integrations win skirmishes; shared IP wins wars.

What? Joint labs, co-funded prototypes, and patents signed by both crests.

How? Google Cloud’s €50 million Innovation Fund underwrites ISV prototypes. CISPE minutes reveal a parallel €4 million Members Innovation Fund and €100 million in software credits—carrots sizeable enough to turn sceptics into allies Enterprise Technology News and Analysis.

Data call-out. In its first two quarters, the fund seeded 36 member projects, five already live in production.

Where rivals faltered, Microsoft’s ill-fated “Azure Space” incubator offered publicity but scant R&D cash; start-ups defected within months.

6 | Manoeuvring Between Powers — Multihoming

In 2022, I called Snowflake’s CFO and asked why they hadn’t gone all-in on a single cloud. His answer: “I prefer three cheque-books on my desk, not one.”

Why? Deploying on multiple hyperscalers keeps each empire bidding for your favour.

What? Parity workloads, DevOps legions fluent in every stack, and contracts that parlay one incentive against another.

How? Snowflake’s tri-cloud standard now sits behind product revenue of $943 million in Q4 FY25—a 28 % year-on-year surge—and a net revenue-retention rate of 126 % Reuters.

Competitive stumble? Oracle’s one-cloud SaaS stance left customers exposed to single-region outages last October; several pivoted to Snowflake within weeks.

7 | Deep Strikes on Specialised Fronts — Vertical Alliances

During my stint advising a pharma scale-up, the data-integrity paperwork for a single assay filled four ring binders. Vertical depth, indeed.

Why? Domain-specific challenges—regulation, data sovereignty—repel generalist armies.

What? Pair cloud compute with a partner possessing deep regulatory knowledge and proprietary datasets.

How? At the AWS Life Sciences Symposium 2025, AWS and Johnson & Johnson unveiled a generative-AI, lab-in-the-loop discovery pipeline that cuts analysis time by 35 % and is projected to shave months off R&D cycles Amazon Web Services, Inc..

Where rivals faltered? Google’s earlier push into genomics lacked a major pharma ally; its platform languished in pilot purgatory.

Competitive Intelligence: Why Rivals Lost Ground

Microsoft vs CISPE – years of licensing brinkmanship forced European providers into regulatory skirmishes; Google seized the gap with an Innovation Fund and €100 million in credits Enterprise Technology News and Analysis.
IBM Cloud Satellite – promised edge ubiquity yet set no tier incentives; partners drifted to AWS’s now-inclusive SaaS co-sell.
Oracle Cloud – single-region disasters exposed the perils of monogamous infrastructure, underscoring Snowflake’s tri-cloud doctrine.

The lesson is brutal and clear: misalign incentives or blur roles, and your enemy won’t need to breach the walls—your allies will quietly open the gate.

Rallying Cry

“Alliances are the longbow of the digital age: inexpensive to field, lethal at range, and decisive when loosed in disciplined volleys. Sharpen your doctrine, fletch your partners, and let fly.”