What’s New with Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) started a little late (launched in 2008 but came to prominence in 2013) compared to the top two market leaders — AWS (in 2006) and Azure (in 2010). That means GCP needs to play “catch-up” with the market leaders on features/functionality and market share.
“Enterprises talked about cloud journeys of up to ten years. Now they are looking to complete the shift in less than half that time [1].” The pandemic is accelerating the shift toward Cloud, creating a big opportunity for the hyperscale Cloud Providers to position themselves to be the enabler for this expedited digital transformation.
Cloud Market Overview (IAAS and PAAS) [4]
The market for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS) is largely dominated by four Hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud in China. The hyperscale providers offer a broad range of capabilities and can address enterprise requirements for availability, performance, security, regulatory compliance, and support. These capability gaps, such as compute, storage, networking, security, and management between hyperscale Cloud providers are shrinking, but the competition for enterprise workloads is heating up. In today’s world, customers need to house their assets in multiple Public Clouds, Private Clouds, and on-prem data centers, and it will be the future of the market. Also, customers are looking for solutions vs individual products.
Projected Cloud Revenue
Cloud Providers Market Share
GCP — SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis
How is GCP Doing?
Sales:
Under the leadership of Thomas Kurian, GCP is doing a good job of moving up the customer org chart to have business-centric digital transformation conversations rather than cloud vendor-centric conversations with Enterprises.
The industry is changing and GCP is changing with it. Enterprise cloud is no longer a pay-as-you-go model, but 10-year deals are common these days. It started with the 10-year $10BB Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) deal that Azure won at the end of last year. Recently, GCP announced 10-year deals with Deutsche Bank, Mayo Clinic, and Sabre. This serves as a strong indicator of the future of the business and GCP’s commitment, to the market and to other customers.
Technology [3, 4, 5]:
Tech companies tend to see the world in particular ways. AWS is very Product/Feature focused — customer-centricity is at the core of everything, and there are various teams working on addressing customer feature gaps. Microsoft has always been about Programs — build tools and capabilities and then package them in world-class programs. At GCP everything has been in the service of Platform. It has programs, people, and product ownership, but GCP is always about Platform all the time.
So, AWS is Products, Azure is Programs and GCP is Platforms — the core mantra, and these overarching principles guide how they go about staffing, building, and going to market. These principles shape how they respond to customers, partners, and competitors.
But, under Kurian, GCP is doing things very differently. The Platform is now at the service of the market rather than the other way around. The move to cross-platform with Anthos (a cloud-independent piece of Kubernetes-based middleware) and the BigQuery Omni platform (run BigQuery on other Clouds; separate compute and storage) signal that shift. Typically, cloud vendors strive to attract workloads to their platforms via proprietary offerings, but with Anthos, Google inverted that model by decoupling the proprietary software platform from the underlying cloud. And with BigQuery, Google is bringing its core competency in Big Data/AI/ML, doubling down on this strategy and creating stickiness with customers. With Anthos as the backbone handling BigQuery Omni, GCP is able to take its products to private data centers and other Clouds (a typical Enterprise environment) and create a single-pane-of-glass to manage their distributed assets.
Conclusions
GCP has come a long way since its inception and has truly established itself as one of the dominant hyperscale Cloud Providers (#3 in market share, #3 in Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s CIPS Magic Quadrant). Under the leadership of Thomas Kurian, Google is focused on bringing Enterprise DNA to GCP which I feel will serve them well in competing with AWS and Azure.
GCP has further reduced the capability gaps with AWS and Azure and even leapfrogged them in managing distributed assets with simplicity. With Anthos and BigQuery Omni, GCP is able to create deeper business relationships with their customers rather than just be another Cloud vendor. GCP is collaborating with partners [6] and entering into 10-year deals with Enterprises. This is a testament to their commitment and technology.
GCP is poised to leverage today’s macro-environment with its strong leadership, Google’s core capabilities, smart investments, and have a great year ahead.
References
[1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS46780320
[2] Elastifile acquisition — https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/expanding-our-enterprise-file-storage-offerings-to-simplify-the-management-and-scaling-of-data
[4] https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-242R58F3&ct=200902&st=sb
