Can Google Inc. get its cloud act together for enterprise solutions? That’s a top question on analysts’ minds as the search giant wades deeper into enterprise information technology.

Going up against Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Google takes on the challenge of simplifying its architecture methods for broader use in the enterprise. Pushing open source as an appealing segue to its Cloud portfolio, Google’s playing up powerful processing and analytics tools for data-happy developers at this week’s Google Cloud Next conference.

“Google has strengths in analytics (would we have big data without the projects that Google launched?) and has created strong technology with impressive pricing to compete against the likes of AWS,” said Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman (Wikibon is owned by the same parent company as SiliconANGLE).

“That being said, Google tends to build things that are very Googley, in other words most people have a hard time understanding and using them. Cloud is supposed to be simple — AWS is getting complicated. Does Google Cloud start out too complicated?” Miniman said.

Addressing complexities is a primary challenge for many enterprise cloud providers, and in September Google unveiled a unified product line under the Google Cloud name. Google Cloud has already drawn in high-profile clients, announcing last month that Snap Inc. is among its biggest clients. Snap has a $2 billion deal with Google over five years for cloud services, but its public offering filing also revealed a $1 billion, five-year deal with AWS. 

Google Cloud is also contributing to company growth, accounting for a 62 percent jump in revenue from a year ago to $3.2 billion along with hardware and app store sales. Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said Google Cloud is gaining momentum fast, thanks to targeted efforts in machine learning, data analytics and security.

“Our cloud business is on a tremendous upswing,” he said in comments during Google’s January earnings call. “We constantly hear from customers that we have moved well beyond table stakes.”

What to expect at Google Cloud Next

In the light of AWS’ nearly five-hour outage last week that affected various sites, including Netflix, Airbnb, Twitch, Slack and others, Cloud Next could also give Google an opportunity to focus on network reliability, highlighting its own products that minimize downtime during software upgrades.

Google announced last year that it would launch support for graphics processing units in 2017, in an effort to make it easier for enterprises to use machine learning. Last month saw the company officially make the GPUs on the Google Cloud platform available to developers. The Cloud Next Conference will likely showcase additional plans for extending its machine learning services to more developers.

The opening keynote presentation at this year’s Google Cloud Next Conference will feature Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc.; Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google; Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud; and Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist for machine learning and artificial intelligence for Google Cloud and professor of computer science at Stanford University.

Other keynote speakers from Google include Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure; Brian Stevens, vice president of cloud platforms; and Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of engineering.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

There are various ways to watch all of theCUBE interviews that will be taking place at the Google Cloud Next Conference, including SiliconANGLE TV and YouTube. You can also get all the coverage from the event on SiliconANGLE.

SiliconANGLE TV

You can watch all of theCUBE’s exclusive interviews and commentary on the Google Cloud Next Conference on the dedicated SiliconANGLE TV page. The guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE at Cloud Next ’17 have not be finalized yet, but we will keep you updated on the dedicated SiliconANGLE TV page.

Watch on the SiliconANGLE YouTube channel

All of theCUBE interviews regarding Google Cloud Next ‘17 coverage will also be loaded onto SiliconANGLE’s dedicated YouTube channel.

Cubecasts

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on both SoundCloud and iTunes, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Livestream of Google Cloud Next ’17 Conference

If you are unable to attend the Google Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco, you can attend one of the many Next ’17 Extended events taking place across the world. These events are hosted by local members of the cloud community, either during or after Next ’17.

If you are unable to attend the official Next ’17 Conference or one of the Extended events, Google will live stream the keynotes and various other sessions on its official Cloud Next event site.

Image: Google