The head of Google Cloud Diane Greene thinks that the company can overtake Amazon Web Services as the market leader by 2022.
Speaking at the Forbes CIO Summit in California on Sunday, Greene, who was named SVP for Google’s cloud business in 2015, said: “I think we have a pretty good shot at being #1 in five years.
“I actually think we have a huge advantage in our data centers, in our infrastructure, availability, security and how we automate things. We just haven’t packaged it up perfectly yet.”
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Under Greene’s leadership, Google Cloud has made a number of acquisitions focused on making the company have a greater enterprise appeal, while also ramping up the messaging around the company’s dedication to the cloud market and restructuring the company’s portfolio in the market.
In 2016 the company spent $625m to acquire Apigee.
Diane Greene, SVP Google Cloud.
On the subject of acquisitions, Greene spoke of the company’s push around the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence with the deals to acquire the likes of DeepMind (Jan 2014) and Kaggle in March of this year.
Google’s push in these areas could help to create a competitive differentiator from the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure, although both of these companies have their own flavours of AI and machine learning technology.
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Google has already had a number of notable projects using these technologies, with the likes of AXA using Google TensorFlow to better predict large-loss major traffic accidents.
Asked by the audience as to how Google would compete with the market leaders, Greene said that the company would focus on its technical capabilities and pointed to the partnership with SAP as proof that its cloud offering is already starting to appeal to enterprises.
Greene said: “Google is just built for having the most technology. “That’s what we’re good at, and that’s who we’ve hired.”
