The game of one up-manship in cloud computing has continued this week with Google revealing some big name clients.
Following on from signing up Apple to the Google Cloud Platform last week, Google’s big name signings are continuing with Walt Disney’s Consumer Products and Interactive Media also opting for the service.
Not only is Walt Disney joining GCP but Home Depot is also moving some of its data to the cloud.
Several more customers are expected to be announced during the Google Cloud Platform Global User Conference in San Francisco that starts today.
These big name signings are important for Google as it looks to make up ground on market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as further highlighting the company’s ambitions to be seen as an enterprise cloud business.
While the customer signings are good news for Google, it has a long way to go before it reaches the same levels of AWS. Morgan Stanley estimates that the AWS service generated around $7.9bn in sales last year, Microsoft Azure posted around $1.1bn in sales and Google generated around $500m, a huge distance off AWS.
However, customers such as Disney, which plans to use the storage, database and application service to run projects such as its UK subscription service Disney Life, should be a big boost to sales. This isn’t a small two-men in a shed operation that Google has signed up as a customer.
Google has had issues in commercialising its platform, so while it is considered by many to be as technically strong as any of the other vendor offerings, it has failed to achieve mass adoption.
Some of the issues it has faced are in areas of support, features such as managing its cloud services and monitoring them compare poorly to the market leaders. These tools are considered essential for big clients and will be something the company has to add to if it is to gain a much greater market share.
Adding tools and capabilities is an area that all three of the leading public cloud vendors do on a continuous basis. Google for example has just added support for Node.js on its App Engine on a managed VM beta.
App Engine aims to make it easy for developers to build, deploy, manage and automatically scale services. Server access is being extended to Express, Hapi, Parse server and other web servers and data can be stored on MongoDB, Redis, or its own cloud datastore.
Another factor that could play an important factor in customers choosing Google may lie in the problems and glitches with the market leaders; Microsoft for example has experienced problems with its cloud service.
The Azure service experienced three Partial Inability To Support Totally Optimal Performance (PITSTOP) incidents yesterday. Issues with DocumentDB left customers looking at a "No data available" message when they tried to view Monitoring Metrics for Total Requests, this glitch has been ongoing for 15 hours.
Further errors were experienced with App Service, Web Apps and Virtual Machine users in the East Asia region, which created high levels of latency for users.
The third error hit the Visual Studio Team Services across West Europe, Australia Eat, East US, East US 2, North Central US and South Central US, effectively most of the world. According to the company this was caused by an issue with a collection database and then it becoming impossible to add new users, this problem has been resolved.
There is definitely wiggle room for Google to make gains in the cloud against the market leaders and big clients are a good way to start. The difference with the latest clients is that they are established businesses with bricks and mortar stores, a change of pace perhaps for the company whose big clients have typically been new Internet-based companies such as Snapchat.
