Clouds are becoming the standard for enterprising computing. Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Cloud offering has been getting left behind.
But under a new business-suited leader, Thomas Kurian, formerly a senior vice president at Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), that is supposed to change, with thousands of new salespeople and a commitment to supporting open source.
It’s a two-pronged attack.
The are a move against Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), the leading cloud platform, which dominates enterprise computing. is a move against Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), the leading cloud infrastructure company, which has been squabbling with major open source projects who claim it violates the spirit of their licensing.
The battle for the enterprise cloud is on.
Kurian’s Way
Kurian and his suits are part of the message.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai seems to only wear ties for Kurian’s image is aimed at , at customers Even when appearing tie-less, he retains the jacket and a button-down shirt.
In addition to hiring a sales team, Kurian is. The open source are a shot across the bow at International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM), which bet the company on hybrid cloud and open source in buying Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) last year. So is BigQuery, a spreadsheet database, meant to prove that only the scale of a Cloud Czar can deliver what big enterprises
Kurian’s plan is also based on interoperability. Google Cloud not only wants to connect enterprises with cloud rivals, but with rival cloud applications from Salesforce (NASDAQ:CRM) and
SAP (NYSE:SAP) Kurian even has Noticeably absent from all this is Oracle.
Anthos, a new container management system , allows use of Microsoft and Amazon clouds, as well as Google and private clouds, for enterprise applications. Tools like , connected to containers, are for Kurian also announced the company’s first vertical-market cloud solution, a collection of tools for
Google is bulking up its , which compete with Microsoft Office. Google killed its Inbox service and is .
The Prize
Gartner Group estimates in enterprise spending will be shifted to the cloud by 2022, with the greatest shift being in infrastructure. Private cloud spending is growing at over 30% per year, public cloud spending at over 20% per year, .
This growth is what justifies the $900 billion valuations placed on the three leading cloud players. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is building out paid services on its cloud, while Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) continues to focus on free services with its cloud. The message of Kurian this week is that the effort to bring everyone else into the cloud has become a three-way race.
The Bottom Line on Google Cloud
Most Google revenue still comes from its free public services, from search, Maps and YouTube. That’s the base on which it is building its enterprise cloud business. That’s the heart of its cash flow.
For now, there is plenty of enterprise cloud business to go around among the Big Three, and even among suppliers like Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), service companies like IBM and cloud-based software vendors like Salesforce.
It’s a big investment that will cut margins in the short term. Last year, 22% of Alphabet’s $137 billion of revenue went to net income. But the enterprise computing opportunity won’t come to the Cloud Czars twice. Google’s message this week is it will pay to be a player.
is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of a new mystery thriller, , available now at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at . As of this writing, he owned shares in MSFT, AAPL and AMZN.
