Microsoft’s Azure cloud service is a market leader, but rival company Google says it can expand its own cloud business by building and expanding on what Microsoft has already achieved.
Cloud services is becoming a huge industry, hence Microsoft’s shift to a cloud first company driven by its Azure platform. The company is leading the cloud movement with over 80% of Fortune 500 companies using Azure, but there are two major competitors to Microsoft. Amazon Web Services is the main competitor, while Google’s ambitions are growing too.
Diane Greene, Google’s cloud chief, has said Google aims to be able to catch up to Amazon and eventually Microsoft and said the company is focusing on cloud more than it ever has before. To back that up, Mountain View has been purchasing data centers and said that the company plans to do things differently.
Speaking at TiEcon Conference in Santa Clara, California, to Ashmeet Sidna of Engineering Capital, Greene discussed Google’s ambitions in the cloud market, and just why companies are seeing cloud as the future:
“The cloud is the biggest IT revolution ever. Everything’s changing and everything’s moving to the cloud. It’s an incredible way to share everything you’re doing, Google’s been doing cloud data centers for 16 years. It’s a core competence of the company.”
Greene admits that Amazon and Microsoft have been offering cloud services more robustly and for longer, and catching those companies will take time. However, she added that Google is willing to use its considerable resources and engage in a quick cloud expansion.
“The underpinnings of the technology really matters. It’s going to be about data analytics and data insights … and big machine-learning (capabilities). It’s going to go on a very steep innovation curve. We have incredibly efficient data centers and also a lot of hooks for automation.”
Possibly the most interesting aspect of the conversation was that Greene confessed that Google was willing to ride the “innovation curve” of Microsoft and build on what other companies have created. There is so much of the cloud space still untapped, the executive stated, that Google has room to expand within the industry and catch companies like Microsoft and Amazon.
“Only 5 percent of workloads are in the public cloud. Effectively you’re riding another company’s innovation curve for free. We’ve open-sourced a lot of technologies like Kubernetes and TensorFlow. As we add more features, we’ll be able to share a lot more strengths with applications.”
