Google is getting more aggressive in the cloud as it looks to make up ground on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
This may not come as a surprise for many who will have noticed that Google has been pretty active on the acquisition front over the past year, having now spent over $1bn on the likes of Apigee, Orbitera, and other acquisitions.
According to Deutsche Bank estimates, Google Cloud Platform has a $750 million revenue run-rate.
Further findings from the markets research study, ‘ Google getting more aggressive in the cloud’, predict that GCP is preparing a series of new product announcements in September that will be aimed at strengthening the company’s customer-facing roadmap.
In a total available market of $1 trillion the combined revenues of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP accounts for less than $15bn, suggesting that while these companies are big in cloud, there is lot more market that they could grow in to.
Deutsche Bank classifies the Enterprise IT spending market by combining storage, network, infrastructure software, IT outsourcing and support, data management software, BI and analytics, application software and consulting. All of which the cloud vendors have some capabilities in and are looking to build out.
On the product front it is expected that GCP will continue to concentrate on machine learning, data analytics and security, which will include data encryption and identity, and access management. Already the company has revealed capabilities such as SQL Server Images and the second generation version of Cloud SQL.
To support these moves the company is also taking an aggressive approach to building out global infrastructure locations. It announced in its Q4 2015 earnings that 12 new regions would be built in 2016 and 2017.
Of course, Google isn’t alone in expanding its infrastructure footprint for its cloud as both Microsoft and AWS have already made similar moves. Microsoft recently opened a region in the UK and AWS has one planned to open in late 2016 or early 2017.
All of these capabilities and build out of infrastructure still rely upon someone to sell what the company is offering, which is why Deutsche bank said that Google is “hiring very aggressively” to increase its enterprise sales rep capacity.
According to the research these moves appear to be helping it to gain traction among the start-up community. Customers estimated that 25% of start-ups are using GCP today, but 75% are with AWS, so it still has a long way to go to catch up.
