One of a series of articles analyzing the strategies the largest public cloud vendors are using to court enterprise customers. Other installments look at Amazon Web Services, IBM and Oracle.

Google is regularly cited by analysts as one of the “big three” infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) leaders in the cloud alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, but is that distinction justified?

Few will deny that AWS fully deserves its status as the IaaS leader. Indeed, it’s the only one of the three that’s confident enough to be fully transparent about its cloud revenues, posting earnings of $2.08 billion in Q3, up 78 percent year over year. Microsoft is clearly the number two player with Azure, although its own cloud revenues are somewhat muddied in comparison to Amazon’s.

Google doesn’t shed much light on its cloud revenues, lumping them in with “other revenues” (including the Play Store) that totaled $1.89 billion in its most recent quarter. Synergy Research Group’s most recent estimates place Google fourth in the market, just behind IBM.

Still, at this early stage in the cloud computing era revenues don’t tell the whole story. What matters more is the viability of Google’s cloud strategy and what sets it apart from the crowd. The question CIOs want to know is, can it really be a viable public cloud alternative to AWS and Azure?

Making sense of Big Data

If Google is to realize its ambitions in the cloud it needs to overcome two major hurdles. The first is that it was late to enter the IaaS game, and the second (and perhaps the bigger of the two) is that – unlike Microsoft, IBM and others – it lacks an existing enterprise customer base. In other words, Google is effectively starting from scratch. Still, it’s doing so with the distinct advantage of having a massive cloud infrastructure already in place, giving it a solid foundation from which to build a compelling cloud platform.

“Like all public cloud providers, Google is looking for load to scale and to reduce the total cost of ownership of its infrastructure,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “But Google is different from the usual public cloud competitors as it operates a large number of data centers and a variety of applications on its infrastructure, and that makes its cloud different from the other vendors’.”

Another difference is that Google has already made the required investments for a large variety of use cases with its own applications, including both consumer and customer-facing applications. This is in contrast to Google’s rivals, who face the disadvantage of needing to build out their infrastructure for many use cases first, Mueller said.

In order to gain a foothold in the enterprise, Google recently said it’s heading in a slightly different direction from its rivals, building a cloud that’s primarily focused on analyzing customer data. This new focus was outlined by Google’s Brian Stevens, vice president of Google Cloud Platform, at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, back in June.

Stevens told Computerworld that Google’s cloud platform is about more than just enabling enterprises to stop buying and maintaining their own servers. The idea is to help companies do more with their data than they could on their own, and as one of the world’s biggest Big Data companies, few providers can offer more expertise and specialized tools than Google.

“Google offer some very good, and sometimes even leading tools, in the Big Data and analytics space,” Mueller said, pointing to solutions like BigQuery and Dataflow. “Also, the open sourcing and provisioning of TensorFlow (Google’s machine learning algorithm) is a very strong move that will attract developers.”

Google excels at providing tools to help customers sense of their data, and that’s what could set it apart from the pack, said Chris Wilder, practice leader and senior analyst of cloud services and enterprise software at Moor Insights & Strategy. He explained that while most other public cloud providers offer their own Big Data and analytics solutions, data analysis is at the core of Google’s own business model. Now, it’s making data analysis the focal point of its cloud strategy too, by positioning its platform as the place for data-driven businesses to manage, understand and utilize advanced analytics.

“By focusing on making Big Data and analytics easier, Google separates itself from other public cloud providers like Amazon or Microsoft Azure,” said Wilder. “Google’s unique selling point – and its main [cloud] revenue generator for that matter – is data analytics.”

One particular strength that Google is most famous for is its ability to target advertising at users according to their interests. Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, told Computerworld that Google will likely try to sell this model to its cloud customers as well.

“This is a significant strong point for Google,” Olds said. “Amazon is mostly giving people the machines to do what they want to in the cloud. Google is looking to give people the entire toolset to do what they want — hardware, software and analytics.”

Google’s big enterprise problem

Although Google is dominant in Big Data and analytics, its cloud platform is still wanting in some other key areas. Gartner Inc. analyst Lydia Leong shot numerous holes in Google’s cloud strategy in the most recent Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, lamenting in particular its focus on enabling new cloud-native applications. Many enterprises will be turned off of Google’s cloud because it “lacks many capabilities important to businesses that want to migrate legacy workloads to the cloud,” she wrote.

Leong also singled out Google’s hybrid cloud strategy, which she said is focused on the Kubernetes container cluster management software and its ecosystem. This strategy is “partner-centric”, Leong said, but Google’s partner program is still nascent even though Kubernetes was open-sourced one and a half years ago.

She has a point. If Google had wanted to, it could easily have carved out a niche for itself as the ‘production container cloud’, with all of the orchestration, performance and security features that would require. After all, Google has been running containers on its own infrastruture for years. It also invented cgroups, a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.) of a collection of processes. But to date all it can offer is the Google Container Engine, which is more or less matched by both Amazon (with EC2) and Microsoft (with support for Kubernetes).

Another big failing Google needs to address is its engagement with enterprise and midmarket customers. While Google has undoubtedly won the hearts of many developers, Gartner’s Leong points out that its sales, solutions engineering and support capabilities still leave a lot to be desired.

It’s an assessment that Constellation Research’s Mueller was also keen to point out. He said one of Google’s major weaknesses is that it has long focused on catering to the single developer, as opposed to enterprises that rely on large teams to build their next-generation apps.

“Google now needs to win over executives through evangelism and showcases, so those who’re set on next-generation application platforms known about Google, are comfortable with using Google, and are ready to bet their career on the success of that project on Google,” Mueller said. “Google is getting better at understanding the enterprise, but still cannot match the deep understanding and relationships some of the public cloud competitors have built over the decades.”

Google’s cloud also suffers from a lack of application APIs, which enable customers to easily plug in to its infrastructure. “Unless it can address these issues, Google will struggle to win over the enterprise,” Wilder said.

Who should use Google’s cloud?

To be fair to Google, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with its Cloud Platform. It’s easy to use, competitively priced, rolls out improvements at an impressive rate and its Big Data toolset is as good as anyone’s. Mueller said this makes Google’s cloud a solid option for any agile startup or primarily data-driven organization.

“Google offers a compelling solution for any company looking for innovative and highly performant use cases along analytics, Big Data and mobile,” Mueller said. “For example, organizations that are involved in advertising and media, and to a certain point business applications, could do a lot worse.”

But Google will need to come up with something more if it’s to compete with its rivals in the larger enterprise space. In its current form it’s unable to match the broad range of use cases offered by the likes of AWS and Azure, especially when it comes to enterprise and mission-critical applications, and that means it can’t compete for business from large organizations, said Moor Insights & Strategy’s Wilder. Google may look to address these shortcomings now that it has hired ex-VMware Inc. founder Diane Greene to head up its cloud businesses, but until such a time as it does, the larger enterprise customers will most likely look elsewhere for their cloud computing needs.

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