For some time now, Google Inc. has been the underdog of the cloud world. Although it has great expertise in running online services, some companies have found Google’s products difficult to use and its business models mercurial, but a just-announced partnership with SAP could put the Google Cloud Platform on more user-friendly terms.

“The reaction [to the SAP-Google partnership] is very positive — shows everybody here that Google is very serious about the enterprise,” said Akash Agarwal, group vice president of enterprise mobile at SAP’s Mobile Business Unit.

Agarwal spoke over the phone to John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, about events from the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, CA.   

Impact on customers and developers

The SAP-Google partnership will help bring transactional and enterprise workloads to the cloud through SAP’s enterprise software. It also shows that Google is setting a new focus on helping enterprises transition to the cloud.

The opportunity is manifold, according to Agarwal. Customers can take SAP HANA workloads and applications to Google’s cloud services. Meanwhile, developers can leverage HANA and HANA Express to build the next generation of applications on the Google cloud.

“We’ve extended Google’s palette of services to include SAP PaaS components to help fast-track developers,” Agarwal said.

For developers, the impact comes from an expanded market, giving them access to three cloud platforms: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This gives developers a choice in which cloud service to leverage for their projects. SAP also offers HANA Express to help developers find their footing in SAP’s ecosystem.

Developers on Google Cloud will have a window into the SAP world, Agarwal stated. That world is big, and the customers for SAP applications are large and doing complex, interesting things. This opens the door for developers to grab their part of the digital transformation wave that’s sweeping enterprise customers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s 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