Google ups the ante in cloud battle with Amazon, Microsoft

Web giant strikes alliances, including with SAP, to boost cloud computing power

Google is taking on Amazon and Microsoft in their own backyard in order to dominate cloud computing services. The Silicon Valley giant is betting big on its cloud technology and forming alliances with other technology companies to tap the moneymaking enterprise business.
At the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, the company announced a significant partnership with German software maker SAP. It would allow customers to run SAP’s flagship product HANA, an in-memory platform for processing high volumes of data in real-time, on Google’s cloud platform. The partnership would also offer Google’s suite of intelligent apps to users.

Security, business tools

“With Google cloud, we now offer businesses, Google quality computing, security and business tools,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai told an audience consisting of hundreds of Googlers and thousands of the company’s customers and partners. “And it is an extraordinary big bet for us,” he said.
An alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur and a native of Tamil Nadu, Mr. Pichai said that Google is on a mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This has made it engage with every branch of computer science.
“It has led us to breakthroughs in cloud computing technology. Google cloud is a natural extension of the company’s mission,” he said.
Like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Google is offering cloud technology that combines a large amount of storage and computing. It then sells it to customers who may want to enhance or set up new data centres.
In February, Snap Inc., the parent company of social media mobile app Snapchat disclosed that it had signed a $2 billion, five-year contract with Google for its cloud services.
“We have possibly the world’s biggest and most powerful secured network,” said Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud.

Mount Everest

She said that if stacked on top of each other, the servers in one of its data centres would rise 5,000 feet above Mount Everest.
Asked how Google would compete with Amazon in the cloud, Ms. Greene said that it was Google’s technology which was giving its customers the “competitive advantage.”
Ms. Greene, who also co-founded enterprise software giant Vmware, brought top executives of large companies like SAP, Colgate-Palmolive, HSBC and eBay on the stage to showcase the impact Google’s cloud technology was creating for them.
Google along with e-commerce company eBay demonstrated the capabilities of a new personal shopping bot (bots are software applications that run automated tasks) or “shopbot” for the Google Home, a voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant, live on the stage.
The bot can help customers assess the value of their possessions. eBay’s chief product officer R. J. Pittman asked the Google Home to connect with eBay and find out the value of his camera. The chatbot told him the price value of his camera even after getting very little description about the product.
“Cloud is moving very fast, we see it as a strategic growth engine that accelerates innovation,” said Mr. Pittman. He said that eBay had more than one billion live listings across 200 countries. Within five months the company was able to run these listings on the Google cloud platform. “It was not a test, not a prototype. It quickly moved to a production-grade environment,” Mr. Pittman said.
Entertainment company Disney said that it had put about 500 projects ranging from customer facing to research and development products on Google’s cloud platform. “We have been able to focus on telling great stories,” said Michael White, chief technology officer at Disney.
HSBC’s chief information officer Darryl West said that the banking and financial services organisation had about $2.4 trillion in assets and besides that, a huge amount of precious data. He said that the company had a set of applications to mine hidden insights from the data to identify nefarious activity such as money laundering. “The cloud partnership with Google does not stop here. It is just the starting point,” said Bernd Leukert, a member of the executive board at SAP for products and innovation.

(The writer is in Silicon Valley, U.S.A., at the invitation of Google)