Last week Google followed Oracle’s Public Cloud announcement with its own Cloud SQL announcement. Today, Google made an enterprise cloud announcement that includes a new Cloud Storage service along with an SLA update for App Engine and the move of the Prediction API from Labs to general availability. Google’s storage announcement follows a big partnership announcement from IBM and Nirvanix (see our coverage here and here).

Here’s a look at Google’s announcements:

• Google Cloud Storage: Google Cloud Storage started life as a Labs project called Google Storage for Developers. Cloud Storage is aimed at enterprises with prices ranging from $0.105 to $0.13 a TB, plus bandwidth costs. It supports OAuth 2.0 authentication to interoperate with Web applications (such as those in the Google App Marketplace). Developers will be able to access storage via the App Engine Files API.
• Enterprise support for App Engine: One of the many criticisms leveled against the App Engine service is that it isn’t enterprise grade. Google is now trying to put this concern to rest with a new enterprise level support option called Premier Accounts. It includes a 99.95% SLA.
• Google Prediction API: The prediction API has been a Labs project since May 2010, and Google announced pricing for it in January. Now it’s graduating to the status of a fully supported enterprise service. The prediction API also gained two new features: Data Anomaly Analysis and the ability to import Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) formatted data.

Services Angle

The trend is clear: all the big players are raising the stakes almost daily as Amazon Web Services, EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, et al race to announce new services, new features and new partnerships. Meanwhile, smaller players are doing their best to add innovative features while scaling up. As Alex Williams puts it, the race to the middle is on.