Why Better Technology Does Not Win Hyperscaler Partnerships with Alan Chhabra

Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Alan Chhabra 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, we 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 Redis and things like Databricks, like Apache Spark. So we had to convince the hyperscalers do not use our open source alone, partner with us and sell our enterprise versions. And it was like a lot of creating FOMO amongst each other. Like, hey, you could have our entire sales teams backing you or we could compete with you. So which hyperscaler wants to get with us first? And at the time we got Google first at MongoDB. And then quickly when we were competing with Google with the other guys, AWS was like, yeah, we want in. And then we did a massive partnership with them and then Microsoft as well. So same thing here, right? So if I unwind your question, cracking the hyperscalers is extremely political. First, they have deep relationships with NVIDIA, deep. And they don't want to upset the supply chain they have with NVIDIA. Second, they're not stupid. They're creating their own chips, right? Okay. Like I mentioned before, they have their own AI chips. They're becoming, you know, they want to be more relevant to the stack. Not only are they just cloud providers, they're creating, they're writing their own language models, even though they're partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI, they're creating their own models and they're developing their own chips. So AWS is Trinium. Microsoft has Maya and Google has their TPUs. And like, so number one, they have deep relationships with NVIDIA and they don't want to upset NVIDIA because if they, somehow their supply gets disrupted, that's a big problem. And when

you say that, because there's a shortage and if NVIDIA says, okay, well, we're going to put you on the slow boat.

Yeah.

There's a lot about supply and demand right now, right? NVIDIA

is not perfect. I mean, NVIDIA has the same, like they can't make enough of what they want. Like no one can, right? So you have to kind of understand the politics of there. So they want to keep NVIDIA as a good partner. They're not stupid. They're building their