Google is serious about the cloud, touting big customers and challenging industry giants

CIO Dive
Posted by CIO Dive March 9, 2017
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  • Dive Brief:

    • Google is making headway in the enterprise cloud market, touting big-name customers like Disney Interactive, Verizon, SAP, Colgate, Home Depot, HSBC and eBay in speeches this week during Google Cloud Next ’17.
    • Diane Greene, the SVP of Google Cloud, said conversations with customers are changing and there is now and “unbelievable acceleration” in its business, according to ZDNet’s report on her keynote. “Does anybody not agree it’s the biggest thing going on in IT right now?”
    • Touting high-profile customers such as Snap Inc., which is running the bulk of its infrastructure on Google Cloud, conference presenters were illustrating why customers are choosing its cloud. Greene also showed off the service reliability of its cloud offerings, calling on its consistent “five nines of availability,” a way of saying that its services are up and running 99.999% of the time, Business Insider reports.

    Dive Insight:

    Google said the fact that registered attendance for the conference is five times last year’s crowd is “another mark of our momentum in the marketplace,” according to a company blog.

    While its customer gains and record attendance are big gains for Google, Google Cloud still has some ground to make up against Amazon Web Services, which currently has a bigger cloud market share than Google, Microsoft, and IBM combined.

    Google Cloud is often characterized as a good choice for startups and consumer apps, but Greene has been working hard to change that perception, drawing on her industry expertise. Greene wants to make it clear that Google is ready to work with big business customers, too. That’s why the company invited several of its large enterprise customers to share the stage at Google Cloud Next.

    Though it made its name in consumer services, Google has been working hard to become an enterprise cloud leader. Last November, Google announced it was creating a Google Cloud Machine Learning group that will focus on delivering cloud-based machine learning solutions to businesses.

    This post originally appeared on our sister publication, CIO Dive. Our mission is to provide busy professionals like you with a bird’s-eye-view of the Information Technology industry in 60 seconds.