Google said its G Suite, a productivity software for businesses, schools and governments, has over 6 million paying customers in March as compared with 5 million in February 2019.
G Suite faces competition from Microsoft’s Office suite and Office 365. Microsoft’s Office has 87.5 percent of the market for productivity suites in 2018 versus Google’s 10.4 percent, according to estimates shared by research company Gartner.
“The business of G Suite is growing at an incredibly healthy and, frankly for me, surprising rate,” Javier Soltero, vice president and general manager of G Suite at Google, told CNBC in an interview.
Javier Soltero joined Google in October after working at Microsoft, where he had been corporate vice president for the Office product group, among other roles.
Millions of people, who have been working from home to reduce the spread of coronavirus, have increased the adoption of the Google Meet productivity-oriented video-calling service, one component of G Suite alongside Gmail, Google Drive and other services.
The service has 25 times more users than it did in January, Soltero said. Google Meet is separate from the consumer-focused Hangouts, which is available to anyone with a Google account.
Google extended features of Meets — including space for up to 250 participants on any given call and live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers on a domain — that are normally reserved for customers of the G Suite enterprise tier of service to all of its G Suite customers until September 30.
Services that compete with Meet, like Cisco’s Webex, Zoom and Microsoft’s Teams, have also taken on new users in the past few months.
Alphabet had generated $2.61 billion in cloud revenue in the fourth quarter, up 53 percent on an annualized basis, representing 5.7 percent of total revenue. The total includes contributions from Google Cloud Platform, the cloud infrastructure for running third-party applications that competes with Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Expansion in the Cloud business could help Alphabet grow outside its core area of advertising, which made up 83 percent of Alphabet’s revenue last year, CNBC reported.
