Google is putting all efforts to improve its business in the Cloud Platform area, and has won clients at Apple and Home Depot as a result.
Google revealed in its press conference on 23 March, 2016 that Home Depot, Disney and Coca Cola are now Google Cloud Platform customers. Google also said BMC, Pivotal, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Tenable Network Security, Veritas and several other enterprise software vendors are working to integrate their offerings with Google Cloud Platform.
Diane Greene, the VMware co-founder who’s now leading Google’s cloud business, has claimed in a press conference that Google may be playing catch-up in the cloud platform services market, but it has an edge in areas like machine learning, open-source software and security.
Amazon.com and Microsoft are the major names in cloud infrastructure, followed by IBM while Google only ranks fourth.
Recent industry data from the market analyst, Synergy Research Group, has stated that Google has witnessed rapid growth during the final quarter of 2015. However, it is still lagging behind the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and IBM in market share terms, mainly due to lack of extensive cloud data center network.
Greene also said Google also offers better pricing and performance when compared to the companies in competition. “We have extraordinarily efficient data center systems and these operations let us offer lower prices,” she said.
Google stands fourth in the $23 billion cloud infrastructure services market, according to Synergy Research Group. AWS ranks first with 31 percent, followed by Microsoft Azure at 9 percent, IBM at 7 percent and Google Cloud Platform at 4 percent, reveal Synergy data. Also of the parent Google Alphabet’s $75 billion in revenue, less than $1 billion came from cloud infrastructure.
The research projects industry growth of greater than 30 percent annually through 2018 as more of the world’s largest and data-heavy companies shift applications from their own data centers to the cloud to gain speed, efficiency and access across employees’ devices.
“Google lags far behind AWS and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market, and at least part of that was down to having a cloud datacentre network that wasn’t as extensive,” conveyed John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst, Synergy Research Group.
Google has conveyed in a blog post that is expanding the Google Cloud Platform to 12 more regions by 2017, with aims to open new data centers in each of the regions it plans to move into, with Oregon, America, and Tokyo, Japan centers planned to be up and running by the end of 2016.
At present, AWS has 12 and Microsoft has 22 centers, respectively. Currently, Google conveys on its cloud platform zones list that it operates in South Carolina, Iowa, Belgium, and Taiwan. Google’s data centres contain servers that support Google products like Gmail, Search, Maps, and other Google Cloud Platform services.
“We’re opening these regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness,” said Varun Sakalkar, product manager, Google in the blog post.
After the deal with Google late last year, Apple is reported to have significantly reduced its reliance on Amazon Web Services, whose infrastructure it uses to run parts of iCloud and other services.
Google is all set to involve partners, wherever possible, for its public cloud platform.
“Partners are a critical piece of our strategy to helping customers run their applications on Google Cloud,” said Brian Stevens, vice president, Product Management, Google Cloud Platform, in a blog post.
As Google develops its team to sell to enterprise customers, it has a requirement for a designated sales force. The enterprise customers require more attention than the average consumer who uses the company’s free utility apps in the cloud, and other self-service cloud features and hence, Google has approximately 60 cloud-related job postings on its site, with about a third of them related to sales and marketing, and another third for IT professionals like cloud software engineers.
Vina Krishnan
editor@infotechlead.com
