M+E Connections

Google Cloud CEO Touts Company’s Aggressive Growth Strategy

Google has an aggressive cloud computing growth strategy in which it’s accelerating digital transformation by offering the best infrastructure, platform and industry-specific solutions, according to Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

“Our strategy at Google for cloud computing is to help organizations in different industries accelerate how they use digital technology,” he said Feb. 11 at the Goldman Sachs 2020 Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.

“We do that with four important capabilities: infrastructure, a platform, solutions for specific industries to help transform digitally, and our expertise as Alphabet in building and running some of the world’s largest consumer services,” he explained.

In the past year, the company has “significantly expanded our infrastructure to a number of regions globally,” he noted, adding: “We also have introduced a number of new capabilities in infrastructure.”

He pointed to the various options that Google Cloud now provides, including the new Google Anthos open hybrid and multi-cloud application platform, introduced last year, enabling users to modernize their existing applications, build new ones and run them anywhere securely. “We have a lot of customers now using it,” he said, noting the company is “seeing strong adoption” because it allows customers to “run our cloud inside their data center.”

When it comes to multi-cloud, Google Cloud is also “bringing the same technology to a 5G network to transfer a 5G network from just being about bandwidth and connectivity to being an application delivery environment,” he told attendees.

There are four important capabilities in Google’s platform, he went on to say: The “ability to build applications, to manage data at scale, to do analytics to use” Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and “to collaborate with people.”

Other key points that Kurian stressed during his presentation included: The fact that Google Cloud’s infrastructure, platform and industry-specific solutions are mature and highly differentiated; Google Cloud’s product maturity and broad partner ecosystem are expanding its total addressable market; Google Cloud is rapidly capturing large enterprise customers with the expansion of direct and indirect distribution channels; and it offers enterprise support, customer success, and other services that drive strong customer retention.

The company has deepened its presence in the largest companies in 21 markets in six industries, he pointed out. But it actually now has strength in eight sectors, according to a slide he showed attendees: Media and entertainment, gaming, retail, healthcare and life sciences, financial services, energy and manufacturing, auto and transportation, and Software-as-a-Service.

Google Cloud is focused on large customers in every industry and geography and, at the same time, it’s embraced open source technology solutions, Kurian told attendees.

“Our goal is to foster that innovation to attract developers and our long-term view is that platforms that win are differentiated not by the solutions that the platform provider provides, but by the ecosystem of solutions that run on that platform,” he said.

Underscoring the strides that Google Cloud has already made, he noted that revenue in the division soared 53% in 2019 as the number of deals it made worth more than $50 million more than doubled.