Google Touts Tech Advantage & Customer Base In European Cloud Battle
ANALYSIS: Google has big cloud ambitions that will challenge AWS and Microsoft Azure
Even with the threat of Brexit threatening to muddy the waters of the European market, Google is looking to extend its cloud infrastructure and customer footprint in the continent, and appears more than ready to tackle the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
As its name would suggest, GCP Next 2017 in London, was gave the search giant a platform to champion its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and its growing position in Europe.
“Europe is [a] primary target for Google cloud,” enthused Sebastien Marotte, vice president of the EMEA region at Google Cloud during a keynote speech.
GCP expansion
“We are literally now fully lifting and shifting all your workloads into our cloud,” he added, championing the appeal of Google Cloud across multiple industries. “We are engaging with a lot of different verticals, whether its financial services, healthcare, retail, transportation, energy or governments.”
This may seem like corporate bluster, but Marotte and other Google Cloud executives backed up their claims with solid examples of big enterprises that have embraced GCP and its multitude of capabilities, firms such as banking giant HSBC.
Google also has a solid partner ecosystem of tech firms like SAP and a major system integrators like Accenture and PwC to help fuel its expansion across Europe.
“There is a key component in our developments [that] is to build these partner ecosystem, and over the past few months, quarters and years we have build an amazing ecosystem in Europe with over 200 partners,”said Marotte.
Cloudy vision
Of course, both AWS and Microsoft have large companies on their books and a healthy footprint in Europe. So Google needs to have more than just its name to trade upon if it is to continue to grow on the continent.
From the keynotes and interviews with Silicon, we were left with the impression that Google wants to not only provide a cloud infrastructure that enterprises can tap into, but use GCP as the one-size-fits-all cloud platform for transforming businesses, under the much championed guise of digital transformation.
Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, explained that Google has funnelled $30 billion over the past three years in capital expenditure to build out GCP into a infrastructure-as-a-service that not only makes it easy to shift a variety of IT workloads off on premise infrastructure and private data centres but also makes use of a suite of other capabilities.
“We’re working with you to develop long-term value here; we’re going to be with you for the long-term,” she said, highlighting the machine learning capabilities that and natural language processing capabilities that Google has baked into GCP along with a swathe of other products.
Greene pointed out that offering such technologies within GCP, rather than providing separate functions or just basic IaaS, allows Google to work with its customer to not only move quickly to the cloud be also embrace GCP in a fashion that is bespoke for them and makes use of its capabilities in a fashion that is meaningful for their business.
