Kyndryl penned a strategic partnership with Google Cloud today that will see the service provider develop a series of new digital transformation services with a specific emphasis on data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI).

“Bringing together Google Cloud’s global infrastructure and leading technology and AI, ML, and analytics with the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider will accelerate global businesses’ ability to launch, new digital businesses and deliver their most critical workloads in a cloud environment,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement.

With Google Cloud, Kyndryl plans to expand its managed SAP services, develop new edge and data-centric applications, and help its largest financial customers accelerate their cloud migrations.

To support these efforts, Kyndryl is also working with Google to launch the Google Cloud Academy for Kyndryl, which aims to get its more than 80,000 technical employees up to speed on the cloud-provider’s services.

The partnership comes amid a busy week of customer wins for Kyndryl, which saw the managed infrastructure provider secure contracts from cybersecurity and risk management company RSA, German automaker BWM, and U.S. defense contractor Raytheon Technologies.

Raytheon tapped Kyndryl to facilitate a complex multi-vendor, multicloud migration that will see the contractor cut its data center footprint by 60%.

Meanwhile, RSA selected Kyndryl to support a similar migration that will see more than 85 terabytes of data moved into the cloud. The project involves migrating three large mainframe environments to an IBM's managed cloud mainframe platform called zCloud, and will enable the vendor to adhere to the regulatory requirements associated with the general data protection regulations.

Finally, BMW this week teamed up with Kyndryl and NetApp to modernize its data center infrastructure across 17 countries. Under the deal, Kyndryl will lead the integration of NetApp’s hybrid-cloud data infrastructure platform and storage services.

Today’s Google Cloud announcement mirrors Kyndryl’s recent partnership with Microsoft and comes just weeks after the company teamed up with VMware to address app modernization and multicloud challenges.

Since it emerged from the ashes of IBM’s Global Technology Services (GTS) business group early last month, Kyndryl has moved quickly to distance itself from itself from its former parent IBM.

The planned spinoff landed Kyndryl on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KD. And despite being a relatively new name, it's already a well-established player in the managed infrastructure market with more than 4,600 clients, 90,000 employees around the globe, and an estimated $19 billion in annual revenue.

From the get-go, forging new partnerships that expand the company’s suite of managed services was a key priority for CEO Martin Schroeter. “We’re investing in our partner ecosystem to support the success of our customers, and we’re focused on expanding our market opportunity across cloud, data, security, and intelligent automation,” he said in a statement.

The strategy is a complete reversal of service provider’s approach under IBM’s leadership, Stephen Leonard, global alliances and partnerships lead at Kyndryl, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

“IBM’s strategy for GTS for a number of years was that GTS would lead with and only lead with and only deliver on IBM cloud,” he said, adding that while IBM Cloud may have been a good fit for some, the strategy only served to alienate the majority of GTS customers.