Google Cloud is capitalising on its data-centric innovation plus, a rapidly expanding portfolio to overtake Microsoft as the innovation leader in the cloud.
With a cloud business that’s barely one-quarter the size of Microsoft’s — Google Cloud will finish this calendar year with revenue of about $26 billion compared to my projection of $100 billion for Microsoft — Thomas Kurian’s company must outflank Satya Nadella’s as the cloud vendor best suited to take customers into the wild new world of digital business.
As Kurian nears the end of his fourth year at the helm of Google Cloud, the company presented a massive list of new products with very clear articulations of their customer value but also showed how a wide range of partnerships is helping Google Cloud gain outsized influence among large and mid-sized enterprises.
It’s hard not to compare Google Cloud’s upbeat and customer-centric mindset and level of preparedness with the recent comments made by Microsoft executive vice president Judson Althoff, who recently sharply criticised moves — by Microsoft’s customers!
Trotting out a bizarre “we’re all citizens of the planet” rationale, Althoff told attendees at a recent Goldman Sachs investors conference that companies should keep their far-flung global supply chains in place rather than adopting onshoring as a way to mitigate risk, optimise operations, engage more successfully with customers, and boost profitability.
Althoff is one of Microsoft’s top three executives — he’s EVP and chief commercial officer — and it is impossible to separate those comments he made at an investors conference from the position taken by the company itself. So, unless or until Microsoft makes some comment regarding Althoff’s “citizens of the planet” doozy, it would be tricky for a big corporation evaluating Microsoft versus Google Cloud to think that Microsoft will have that customer’s best interests at heart.
Of all the partnerships announced, the most compelling one was around the open-data ecosystem, allowing customers greater freedom to move and access data across platforms, various storage formats, and even storage vendors.
Some details include:
BigQuery support for unstructured data, Apache Spark, and DataStream. In general, we got the impression from Google Cloud that it is ready now to get very serious about its data cloud and elevate it from among its promising new offerings to being a core platform that customers can use for various strategic initiatives with BigQuery at the hub.
There were many more announcements — across cybersecurity (aka Trusted Cloud), Open Infrastructure Cloud, and Collaboration Cloud.
In his keynote, Kurian offered examples across this range of new cloud services and said, “Our vision for cloud computing is simplifying all technologies so your business can digitise and accelerate.” He cited some intriguing customer examples:
● Groupe Renault used analytics to save 100M Euros;
● Home Depot saved 30% from its information technology (IT) budget by consolidating and modernising its IT systems
● Bell Canada is now able to deploy 5G services in five weeks rather than six months;
● and Chicago Mercantile Exchange can directly deliver real-time data for 90% less cost.
But perhaps the most compelling set of innovative ideas came from a few members of the OCTO (Office of the CTO) team, which I have long said is a hidden gem within Google Cloud. They spoke about engagements with banks, governments, Major League Baseball, insurance companies, and more driven by their work in artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics.
Sustainability was a major issue, as was the growing trend around geospatial data and AI applications for elevating new insights around everything from natural disasters (flood planning) to business opportunities (which neighbourhoods have the most swimming pools).
