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Google recently hosted its annual Next conference, during which it made a large number of announcements (major or minor) (> 122), providing guidance on the direction of its cloud platform . The details of the ads have already been widely covered in the media, but the general idea of the strategy they represent is less clear.
Business, not consumer
Google knows that there is a problem of perception when it is about activating the cloud in the business. With his past and almost unparalleled consumer interest, he needs to convince more organizations that he is a true competitor to AWS and Azure for enterprise application deployment and collaboration. To this end, several focal points have emerged, revealing a growing tendency to face competition with competitors in the corporate sector.
security
During the conference, Google repeatedly raised the high-level security of the Google Cloud platform, including the ability for any customer to prevent Google from not viewing business data. The real message she was trying to spread was that her corporate cloud was not like the consumer, where all the data and interactions were subject to Google data mining. Business data in the Google Cloud platform has always been separate from the mainstream cloud, but Google needs to combat the perception that your data is not secure, which has led some potential users to find themselves out of business. move away from the platform. There is still a lot to do in this area, because I still hear comments on data privacy, but Google is making progress.
Migration
Google understands that not all businesses will transfer all their applications to their cloud, or even to a cloud platform. Indeed, I estimate that 75 to 80% of companies have a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and that they will continue to do so. But Google wants to provide a unified management infrastructure on all these clouds so that customers can eventually transfer more applications to their cloud. To this end, it announced Anthos, a management and migration tool that runs on virtually every cloud, so businesses can manage multiple application instances from a single location. It also makes it easy to transfer applications to Google's cloud platform. This "Swiss" approach has many advantages because it gives Google a way to stay neutral in the cloud applications it manages, while facilitating transport in cloud environments. Multi-cloud management is a major headache for organizations, which can be a real advantage for Google because it allows many companies to get in the door. He praised HBC, Siemens and Cisco among the adopters. And vendors such as VMware, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, and Lenovo are committed to providing their Anthos customers with hyperconverged infrastructure.
HAVE
Google has great in-house expertise in the use of AI and machine learning to harness data to better understand its users. And many companies want to exploit this capability. But the serious problem with AI is that for most of the available solutions, it takes a significant number of data creation specialists to create the models necessary for that understanding. Announcing the AutoML Model Builder, Google tells the marketplace that it wants to create a range of commercial modeling capabilities to gather information from large amounts of data and accelerate the adoption of ML and AI. AutoML will allow organizations to use pre-learned "templates" such as AutoML Vision and AutoML Natural Language. These offerings should spur the machine learning market and, of course, make greater use of Google Cloud computing resources, thus increasing Google's revenue. This increased intelligence will enable new capabilities in many areas, including customer service (a key target for Google), healthcare and financial services.
Collaboration
Google also believes it has a compelling story to tell with its collaboration tools, having expanded its G suite to a number of important features for enterprise users (conference, planning, discussions, and soon with Google Assistant). A large portion of consumers and small businesses use G Suite, but many companies have struggled to sell it because Microsoft has been controlling this space for years. Google has made progress and has highlighted some large winning companies during the event (eg Whirlpool, Carfourre, Schlumberger and Airbus). But it is also trying a new strategy. It closely associates its AutoML Tables technology with collaboration and enables Sheets to act as a front-end server for the information companies need, providing information that goes far beyond managing activities on Excel. as many companies do now. Plus, with its automatic voice and visual recognition capabilities, including Google Assistant's upcoming integration, it can be an important tool for improving interactions within the company. Microsoft owns the vast majority of enterprise collaboration installations, but its progress is slow and steady.
Front-line workers
Google is trying to sell its Chromebooks as a professional tool for several years. Sales pitch: Having everything planned in the cloud means a low operating cost and a smaller exposed footprint to secure. But it is only recently that this low-cost message has been crowned with success. Chrome has a major footprint in the education sector, where Chromebooks have the most success. But beyond that, its impact was weak. By changing its goal of general corporate users instead of front-line workers (field services, retail, healthcare, for example), Google hopes to launch a much larger migration to the world. Chromebooks. In addition, with the addition to the enterprise, many of the security and manageability features required by enterprise deployments have been added. In addition, its partnerships with several key application providers, particularly in the area of customer service, now allow it to sell solutions rather than just components. Finally, the integration of its artificial intelligence and collaboration features allows it to create more compelling use cases than with Chromebooks alone. I'm expecting to see a slow migration to Chromebooks in the business, especially for front-line workers, as more applications go to the cloud (I think the most workplace applications will not be in the cloud for at least two or three years, with many legacy applications never making the transition).
Bottom line
Google tries to differentiate itself from other cloud providers by extending its reach and incorporating compelling components developed for its own internal uses. In addition, it is trying to position itself as "Switzerland" in multi-cloud deployments, which make up the majority of enterprise cloud users. Businesses continue to have a perception problem with Google. Some of them believe that its consumer orientation and data mining make it less strategic than Azure or AWS. However, I hope that Google will continue its efforts in the companies and that more and more companies will consider it as a credible choice. Google Cloud is positioning itself as a strong competitor of Azure and AWS and is expected to increase its market share over the next few years.
Jack Gold is the founder and principal analyst of J.Gold Associates, LLC., An information technology analysis company based in Northborough, Massachusetts, covering the many aspects of computer science. professionals and the general public as well as emerging technologies. Follow him on Twitter @jckgld or LinkedIn on https://www.linkedin.com/in/jckgld.
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