Google owner Alphabet is “thoughtfully looking at” the potential for on-premises cloud solutions, the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai said on an earnings call late Thursday, as rivals ramp up their hybrid cloud offering.
The comments came after the company reported its Q3 results, posting a 36.5 percent increase in net income year-on-year to $9.19 billion.
“On-Prem is a Big, Big, Big Requirement for Customers”
In a call that emphasised Google’s consumer hardware offering and innovations in search, but which was somewhat muted on cloud, Pichai said: “The general sense I get is, we’re very aligned with… this notion of supporting open architecture so that enterprises don’t feel locked in and allowing for a multi-cloud environment to develop.”
He added: “That’s the direction we are betting on and our indications are that the market is headed in that direction as well. So that gives us a lot of comfort.”
Pressed on rivals like Azure offering hybrid solutions, he pointed to partnerships with SAP and VMware, but added: “We are thinking about how to do that better. There are many, many situations we are in where on-prem is a big, big, big requirement for customers, but with our partnership approach, we’ve been able to address the needs well.”
Google Data Centres: Increasing Part of CapEx
Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat added: “Datacenter construction is an increasing percentage of our CapEx investment.”
She added: “We’re now in various stages of developing more than 20 datacenter sites globally. We’re also investing in network infrastructure such as undersea cables so we can deliver speed and quality. So again this really goes to our view of the opportunity set [in cloud]”.
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Cloud-Based Gaming Opportunity: “Blown Away”
The CEO was “blown away” by seeing the company’s ability to stream a game which needs real-time interactions and to be able to do that from the cloud, he added meanwhile, pointing to the recent beta of “Project Stream”.
Sundar Pichai said: “It’s one of the most important technological advances I’ve seen in a while. And so we are going to focus on that and make sure we are making progress there and bring newer experiences for gamers.”
See also: Google in Browser-Based Gaming Push with Project Stream
The company, which came under sustained attack from President Donald Trump in previous months, meanwhile emphasised in an apparent fillip to the President that 80 percent of its investment in Q3 had been in the US.
See also: Donald Trump, Human Rights Watch in Unlikely One-Two Attack on Google
