When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple Inc. last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant’s cloud business.

And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Corp.’s Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company–and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals.

But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google’s Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS’s $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it’s even a distant third behind Azure’s $1.1 billion in estimated sales.

This week, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, starting Wednesday in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google’s cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene’s first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond.

Searching for a cloud coup

Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google’s container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google’s Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. “NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction we’ve gotten,” he said.

Also on the agenda are big-name customers such as The Home Depot and Coca-Cola Co., as well as recent new customers such as Spotify Ltd. There also will be a speaker from Netflix Inc., which uses Google Cloud only for backup storage, not its massive streaming video–which has some observers such as Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak wondering if that could be the next big cloud coup for Google. “One of our goals for 2016 is to show the enterprise we’re ready for them,” said Greg DeMichillie, a Google Cloud Platform director of product management. “Tomorrow we’ll be talking more about that.”

More clues to Google’s plans will come from other leading lights scheduled to talk, such as Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, and Google Fellow Jeff Dean, who helped spearhead key cloud technologies such as the Big Data programming model MapReduce and the data storage system Bigtable as well as Google’s recent artificial intelligence breakthroughs. The latter is a key focus of its cloud offerings, given the huge role artificial intelligence (AI) has played in Google search, speech recognition, language translation, image recognition, and other products. In particular, Dean is expected to talk about the recently introduced Vision Application Programming Interface for other applications to tap.

Google also may unveil new partners, such as consultants and resellers that would supplement direct sales to reach more small and midsized businesses. And it could even announce a new round of price cuts, the last of which was nearly a year ago. Google has been hammering on its claimed price advantage, which so far has helped it capture business from thrifty companies.

Serious about the enterprise?

Still, to win over the skeptics, Greene will have to answer several more big questions about its cloud business–most of all whether it’s really serious this time about enterprise computing. Although Greene’s hiring last November was seen as a sign that Google is finally getting serious about the cloud, many customers are not yet convinced of its resolve to move beyond consumer services in a big way.

In recent years, the company has appeared to change strategies often, and it releases many services in beta test mode without deadlines for finished releases. That gives pause to enterprises that can’t afford to bet their businesses on a cloud computing provider without a guarantee of a reliable foundation of services.

“Companies aren’t always sure if a [Google cloud] service will move from beta to general availability, or beta to cancelled,” said Wikibon analyst Brian Gracely. (SiliconANGLE and Wikibon are owned by the same parent company.)

That’s the big reason why, analysts say, Google has not yet persuaded its large enterprise customers to commit to big spending on its cloud services. Even Apple’s reported $400 million to $600 million deal for Google cloud services, for instance, is a small portion of Apple’s overall cloud and data center spending. A source close to the situation noted that Apple already has been using Google cloud storage for some time and that the deal likely doesn’t include a broad range of cloud services.

Google’s overall business isn’t yet hurting for lack of a leading cloud business. Indeed, it has leveraged its massive, sophisticated computer and networking infrastructure to lucrative effect to run its own search and YouTube, as well as its massive advertising business. It also is accelerating the building of data centers for its cloud platform, including two new ones announced today in Oregon and Japan, with plans for 10 more around the world by the end of 2017.

But failing up to now to make a big play to offer up parts of that infrastructure for other companies to use means Google has foregone billions of dollars in revenues. The lack of a pole position in cloud services also potentially leaves the company vulnerable to key rivals such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and even new customer Apple, each of which is expanding into various key technology markets from advertising to apps to video. Not least, Google risks being seen as an also-ran in tech’s next big wave.

The right track

Some customers are convinced Google is getting on the right track. ShareThis Inc. is best known for its social sharing widget on thousands of websites, but it also makes coin from using the two terabytes of data gathered from all that sharing to help advertisers target customers and analyze ad campaigns. To handle all that, it used Amazon’s cloud services to store and analyze the data.

But in the past year, it has migrated much of its cloud-based services to Google, for a number of reasons, said Isaac Mosquera, the company’s vice president of data, engineering and insights. In particular, ShareThis is using Google’s cloud storage and its BigQuery data analytics because  Google provides an additional layer of abstraction through its Kubernetes software for managing cloud applications. That means ShareThis needs fewer engineers to manage the system, saving up to 60 percent of operational costs over AWS. Although the company still uses AWS, said Mosquera, “we’re slowly transitioning everything over to Google.”

Despite the enthusiasm of some customers, Google has a big to-do list that won’t get entirely checked off anytime soon. For one, said Lydia Leong, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc., the company needs a broader range of cloud services, especially popular business apps such as SAP and those of cloud rivals Oracle and Microsoft. To that end, Google was reported recently by Recode to have compiled of potential acquisitions of app companies, including public e-commerce company Shopify Inc., payroll provider Namely Inc. and sales tracker Xactly Corp.

Google also would benefit from focusing on areas where it currently is stronger than competitors, such as big data analytics, said Gracely. “They have huge data sets that they could expose to customers,” Gracely said. “This should be the market segment that Google is primarily focused on.”

Google’s Hölzle said late last year that he expected the company’s cloud revenues to top its ad revenues by 2020. But given how far Google trails behind AWS and Azure, observers remain skeptical that Google can gain much anytime soon on AWS and Azure. “It will take years for Google to build a material enterprise sales/support presence and a suite of Cloud Platform services that will be competitive with Azure,” Deutsche Bank analyst Karl Keirstead wrote in a note to clients late last year.

For now, the race for market share may well matter less for the next few years than the fact that the market itself is booming. No matter how small Google’s boat may be right now, it could rise rapidly on that tide.