Cloud providers that have tried to best Amazon Web Services at their own game have not met with success. To avoid winding up scrap metal in the AWS derby, Google Inc. is taking a detour; by offering enterprises services honed for specific use-cases, can they cut corners and finish first?

“They’re creating a lot of really compelling services, not just on the core infrastructure services, but then also some really unique, very use-case focused services,” Joe Arnold (pictured), founder, president and chief product officer of SwiftStack Inc., said of Google Cloud.

Arnold spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, CA, studio to discuss happenings at Google Cloud NEXT 2017 event.

Of interest to Arnold was Google Cloud’s vertical service offerings, including one for genome analytics. “I think that’s the way for them to get penetration into specific industries,” Arnold added.

If Google Cloud presents these use-case services in an easy go-to-market package, Arnold said, the instant gratification could lure some customers away from AWS, IBM and other cloud providers it is currently trailing behind.

The data domicile dilemma

Google’s weakness is one challenging all cloud providers trying to corner the multi-cloud market: the transfer of data from one application or environment to another, according to Arnold.

“It’s hard because of networking; it’s hard because of data; it’s hard because of the way you have to move different parts of your application around,” he said.

Google is attacking these problems, specifically, because it wants to be the multi-cloud company of choice, stated Arnold. It has acquired mulit-cloud manager Accenture for this purpose; and it is also incorporating Kubernetes (an open-source system for managing containerized applications) and containers to increase mobility among clouds. This helps Google Cloud compete with Amazon, which can lock users in when they design an app on AWS.

“That’s a non-portable application,” Arnold said. “That’s just like building an application to run on Windows. People don’t want to get stuff locked in again.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud NEXT 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE