On day two of Google’s Cloud Next gathering in San Francisco, attendees heard presentations which included some large big data enterprise names like Chevron, Mastercard and Twitter. Could this be a sign that Google LLC is turning the corner in gaining large-scale enterprise adoption for its cloud business?

“Google Cloud is showing some customers up there, but they’re a long way from winning the enterprises,” said John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. “What you see Google winning now is the alpha techies; they know tech, they know scale, and they can come in and appreciate the goodness of Google. These are people with massive tech chops.”

Furrier was joined at the conference by co-host Dave Vellante, and they discussed new products and services released at the event on Wednesday, the growing level of competition in the cloud space as Google expands its portfolio, and continued pressure to make numerous announcements for the cloud ecosystem.

Bringing serverless to Kubernetes

Following its practice of using technology internally and then bringing it out in beta for use in the external world, part of a “long-game” strategy described by Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Diane Greene, the company made multiple announcements from the keynote stage on Wednesday. These included Knative, a new open-source project that brings serverless to the Kubernetes container orchestration management system.

“A big theme of the keynotes this morning was developer agility, bringing microservices and things like Kubernetes to the developer community,” said Vellante, who noted that Chevron used a new machine learning data ingestion tool for Google Cloud to find drilling sites. “That’s using tech to solve a business problem and drive productivity. Google crushes it with those types of data applications.”

In addition to Knative, Google also highlighted recent use cases for Velostrata Inc., a cloud migration startup acquired earlier this year, and Cloud Functions, the company’s suite for event-driven serverless computing. “Amazon definitely has competition with Google,” Furrier said. “Between Velostrata and Knative and Cloud Functions, Google is shoring up their offerings. It makes them a formidable competitor.”

Velostrata is a cloud migration provider acquired by Google this year, while Cloud Functions is the company’s serverless platform built in response to Amazon’s AWS Lambda and Microsoft’s Azure Functions.

The analysts took note of the many announcements made by Google Cloud since the beginning of the conference on Tuesday, which resembled previous events held by Amazon Web Services Inc. At one AWS event last fall, 22 new services were announced in a single day.

“Google realizes that it’s got to compete with Amazon from the keynote standpoint,” Vellante said. “When you compare what these cloud guys do from the traditional enterprise shows that we go to, there’s no comparison. There were dozens of announcements that Google made today.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of the Google Cloud Next event:

Photo: Google