INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Google is hosting its annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco this week
With 20,000 developers in attendance, Cloud Next has become the cloud-centric counterpart to Google I/O
A few years ago, when the event only had about 2,000 attendees and Google still hosted it on a rickety pier, Diane Greene had just taken
over as the CEO of Google cloud businesses and Google had fallen a bit behind in this space, just as Amazon and Microsoft were charging
Since then, Google has squarely focused on bringing business users to its cloud, both to its cloud computing services and to G Suite.
Ahead
of this year Cloud Next, I sat down with Diane Greene to talk about the current state of Google Cloud and what to expect in the near future
As Greene noted, a lot of businesses first approached cloud computing as an infrastructure play — as a way to get some cost savings and
access to elastic resources
&Now, it just becoming so much more
People realize it a more secure place to be, but really, I feel like in its essence it all about super-charging your information to make
your company much more successful.& It the cloud, after all, where enterprises get access to globally distributed databases like Cloud
Spinner and machine learning tools like AutoML (and their equivalent tools from other vendors).
When she moved to Google Cloud, Greene
argued, Google was missing many of the table stakes that large enterprises needed
&We didn&t have all the audit logs
We didn&t have all the fine-grained security controls
We didn&t have the peer-to-peer networking
We didn&t have all the compliance and certification,& she told me.
People told her it would take Google 10 years to be ready for
&That how long it took Microsoft
And I was like, no, it not 10 years.& The team took that as a challenge and now, two years later, Greene argues that Google Cloud is
definitely ready for the enterprise (and she tired of people calling it a ‘distant third& to AWS and Azure).
Today, when she thinks about
her organization mission, she sees it as a variation on Google own motto
&Google mission is to organize the world information,& she said
&Google Cloud mission then is to supercharge our customers& information.&
When it comes to convincing large enterprises to bet on a given
vendor, though, technology is one thing, but a few years ago, Google also didn&t have the sales teams in place to sell to these companies
That had to change, too, and Greene argues that the company new approach is working as well
And Google needed the right partners, too, which it has now found with companies like SAP, which has certified Google Cloud for its Hana
in-memory database, and the likes of Cisco.
A few months ago, Greene told CNBCshe thought that people were underestimating the scale of
And she thinks that still the case today, too
&They definitely are underestimating us
And to some extent, maybe that hurt us
But we love our pipeline and all our engagements that we have going on,& she told me.
Getting large businesses on board is one thing, but
Greene also argued that today is probably the best time ever to be an enterprise developer
&I&ve never seen companies so aggressively pursuing the latest technology and willing to adopt this disruptive technology because they see
the advantage that can give them and they see that they won&t be competitive if the people they compete with adopt it first,& Greene told me
&And because of this, I think innovation in the enterprise is happening right now, even faster than it is in consumer, which is somewhat of
a reversal.&
As for the companies that are choosing Google Cloud today, Greene sees three distinct categories
There are those that were born in the cloud
Think Twitter, Spotify and Snap, which are all placing significant bets on Google Cloud
Not shy to compare Google technology prowess to its competitors, Green noted that &they are with Google Cloud because they know that we&re
the best cloud from a technology standpoint.&
But these days, a lot of large companies that preceded the internet but were still pretty
data-centric are also moving to the cloud
Examples there, as far as Google Cloud customers go, include Schlumberger, HSBC and Disney
And it those companies that Google is really going after at this year Next with the launch of the Google Services Platform for businesses
that want or need to take a hybrid approach to their cloud adoption plans
&They see that the future is in the cloud
They see that where the best technology is going to be
They see that through using the technology of the cloud they can redeploy their people to be more focused on their business needs,& Greene
explained.
Throughout our conversation, Greene stressed that a lot of these companies are coming to Google because of its machine learning
tools and its support for Kubernetes.&We&re bringing the cloud to them,& Greene said about these companies that want to go hybrid
&We are taking Kubernetes and Istio, the monitoring and securing of the container workflows and we&re making it work on-prem and within all
the different clouds and supporting it across all that
And that way, you can stay in your data center and have this Kubernetes environment and then you can spill over into the cloud and there no
lock-in.&
But there also a third category, the old brick-and-mortar businesses like Home Depot that often don&t have any existing large
centralized systems but that now have to go through their own digital transformation, too, to remain competitive.
While it fun to talk about
up-and-coming technologies like Kubernetes and containers, though, Greene noted the vast majority of users still come to Google Cloud
because of its compute services and data management and analytics tools like BigQuery
Of course there lot of momentum behind the Google Kubernetes Engine, too, as well as the company machine learning tools, but enterprises are
only now starting to think about these tools.
But Greene also stressed that a lot of customers are looking for security, not just in the
cloud computing side of Google Cloud but also when it comes to choosing the G Suite set of productivity tools.
&Companies are getting hacked
and Google, knock on wood, is not getting hacked,& she noted
&We are so much more secure than any company could ever contemplate.&
But while that definitely true, Google has also faced an interesting
challenge here because of its consumer businesses
Greene noted that it sometimes takes people a while to understand that what Google does with consumer data is vastly different from what it
does with data that sits in Google Cloud
Google, after all, does mine a good amount of its free users& data to serve them more relevant ads.
&We&ve been keeping billions of people
data private for almost 20 years and that a lot of hard work, but a cloud customer data is completely private to them and we do have to
continually educate people about that.&
So while Google got a bit of a late start in getting enterprises to adopt its Cloud, Greene now
believes that it on the right track
&And the other thing is, we&re playing the long game,& she noted
Some people estimate that only 10 percent of workloads are in the big public clouds
And if it not in a public cloud, it is going to be in a public cloud.&
