Google might have lost the cloud race to Amazon Web Services, but it certainly hasn’t lost the war. Not yet anyway.

Instead of chasing its rivals for market share, Google is heading down a different path, said Brian Stevens, the company’s vice president of cloud platform in an interview with Computerworld.

“It’s not about catching up to [Amazon],” he said. “It’s about doing things in a new cloud way.” The company believes its expertise in using analytics for its own business will make it a leader in analytics in the public cloud.

According to Stevens, Google is aiming to be much more than just a cloud computing provider – it wants to go whole hog and help businesses analyze and make sense of their data, too. That will help Google differentiate its cloud offering from that of AWS and Microsoft Azure, Stevens believes.

“Companies need to better understand their users,” Stevens said. “What do they want? What do they like? Once a company knows that, they can build campaigns around that.”

Cloud is a level playing field

No one disputes the fact that Google has a lot to offer in analytics, but the sudden change in strategy is really just a lazy effort to mask the company’s unwillingness to tackle AWS head-on in the public cloud, said Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman.

“This is a poor attempt by Google to try to position itself against what AWS was two or three years ago, which was primarily Information-as-a-Service (IaaS)”, Miniman said.

“The line between IaaS and PaaS is, as one guest on theCUBE said, “passé””, the analyst joked.

What Google is trying to do is show the focus it wants, rather than taking a risk and saying it will actually take down AWS, Miniman explained. The analyst said this is a typical tried-and-tested formula for vendors: Define an area or position that suits them best, then claim leadership of that area/position. In Google’s case, it’s a strategy that might well work, but even if it does, Miniman doesn’t believe it will change how the community perceives Google’s position in the market.

“Whether Google likes it or not, they will be compared to the full AWS and Azure suites,” Miniman said. “Google has been criticized for not being “all-in” on the cloud, even though it has lots of great products like Kubernetes, and partners with major hybrid cloud players like Intel and VMware.”

Miniman isn’t the only one to see through Google’s positioning as a smokescreen. Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said Google will be forced to compete on a level playing field no matter how it tries to spin things.

“This is a fog flare in the cloud wars, in my opinion,” Meuller said.  “If you want to do analytics, you need a lot of data (storage), a lot of models to crunch (compute) and you need to serve those fast (networking). So you compete in all of these areas, both purchasing-wise and architecture-wise. It’s no different for Amazon.”

Will Google ever go all-in on cloud?

One likely reason for Google’s apparent unwillingness to compete directly with AWS is that cloud remains just a small part of Google’s business. Google’s main game is still web services like search and email, where over 90 percent of its revenues are tied to advertising. It’s therefore unlikely Google will make cloud its top priority anytime soon.

“[Cloudera, Inc. founder]Jeff Hammerbacher once said that it would be a shame if the best minds of our generation are working on better click rates,” Miniman related. “The question now for Google is, will it really focus enough time and effort on its products that are not ad-generating to get the results it desires?”

That’s not to say Google can’t become a leader in the cloud analytics space, but its rivals won’t be standing idly by either, Miniman pointed out.

“Google absolutely has a solid story on analytics with Google App Engine, but they are by no means alone,” he said. “AWS and Microsoft Azure are quite aware of the analytics and data opportunities and are fighting for this space too.”

Image credit: Moud Barthez via Flickr.com