In the race for enterprise cloud market share, where Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure currently dominate, Google Cloud’s strategy has resembled slow and steady, with a methodical approach that has involved incubating sophisticated engineering-centric products internally first and then gradually rolling them out to customers.

In a tech industry filled with hares, Google LLC’s cloud approach has stood in marked contrast to conventional wisdom, where first-to-market and lightening fast advances separate winners from losers. Yet as Google unveiled a significant number of new products and services during its Cloud Next gathering in San Francisco over the past week, there were signs that the company’s slow-and-steady approach could position it as a cloud option that businesses would be willing to adopt.

Standing front and center in the speculation and debate surrounding Google’s cloud strategy is Diane Greene, chief executive officer of Google Cloud and onetime founder of VMware Inc. The cloud computing executive has steadfastly pursued her belief that the way to capture enterprise business is ultimately through data, the digital gold that is powering the information-dependent economy, and a focus on engineering.

“It’s all about information, and that’s why I say Google is the modern enterprise company,” Greene said. “We take information, we organize it and we supercharge it. That’s what every business needs to do, and we’re the best in the world at it.”

Greene spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. They discussed recent enterprise customer wins, the company’s engineering-centric culture and strategy, the critical importance of security, and advances in machine learning. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features Diane Greene as its Guest of the Week.

Target signs on

Several recent customer wins offer promising signs for Google. The company revealed on Monday that Target Corp. would be migrating key business processes to Google Cloud. Snap Inc. inked a $2-billion, five-year deal for Google’s cloud services last year, and Twitter Inc. has begun migrating portions of its massive Hadoop infrastructure as well.

“Those are very technically sophisticated people,” Greene said. “They come and use BigQuery, data analytics and our infrastructure. They are coming to solve whatever problems they have.”

More often than not those problems are engineering-driven, a fact not lost on Greene or the high-caliber team she has put together, many of whom happen to be women. Jennifer Lin runs product teams focused on cloud services and open-source, Melody Meckfessel is vice president of engineering, Aparna Sinha leads many of the Kubernetes initiatives, and Deepti Srivastava manages Cloud Spanner.

Engineers work directly with customers

If there is anything to be learned from competition in the enterprise cloud computing space it is that there is no single clear path for success. While AWS leveraged its e-commerce and retail expertise, and Microsoft drew heavily on its extensive partner network, Google’s engineering focus, deeply ingrained in the company’s culture, has emerged as the face of its cloud strategy. That’s because the engineering teams are working directly with cloud customers.

“Everybody said you’ll never get that engineering team caring about working with customers,” Greene recalled. “Our engineering team is loving working with external customers. I knew we would because we had the same quality engineers at VMware, and they loved it.”

Google’s approach may resonate in the enterprise because many companies are re-thinking how to engineer an infrastructure to protect critical assets and drive business growth. It’s a difficult challenge, no doubt communicated by customers to the engineering teams at Google, and the company’s most recent cloud product announcements reflect this reality.

New enterprise security tools

Security, a top concern for many executives today, offers a prime example. On Wednesday, Lin announced a number of security enhancements designed to protect the enterprise. These included container registry vulnerability scanning, a Titan Security Key, context-aware capabilities in the cloud and binary authorization.

“We’re pretty proud of our security, because it really is at every layer, deeply integrated,” said Greene, who pointed out that Chromebook now comes equipped with hardware-based, two-factor authentication in G Suite. “Google went to that, and since we did, not a single one of our 85,000 employees has been phished. It’s all the way down to proprietary chips, which check that the boot hasn’t been tampered with.”

Another example can be found in AutoML, a machine learning platform introduced by Google last year. Among the extended features announced during the Next conference was AutoML Vision, drag-and-drop functionality that employs Google Cloud’s backend to train image and object detection models. The message to enterprise users is they won’t always need complex data science programming to take advantage of machine learning tools.

In her keynote appearance on Tuesday, Greene described how AutoML was being used by oceanographic researchers to identify dolphin species on the high seas. Before AutoML, it took the busy academic staff months to train models. Now the process is down to a few minutes, according to Greene.

“Professors and researchers were looking at that,” Greene said. “Is that what they should be doing? I don’t think so.”

Whether Google’s engineering cloud strategy will pay off in substantial growth over the coming year remains to be seen. The competition will certainly not get any easier. On Thursday, Amazon announced a 49 percent increase in earnings from AWS. And Microsoft revealed in a recent earnings call that its Azure revenue was up 89 percent year-over-year and it had doubled the amount of $10-million-dollar cloud deals.

For Greene and her team, the process of re-imagining the data-driven enterprise is just part of the journey, the “long game” as Greene recently described it. “Everybody is reengineering how they do business,” Greene said. “It’s the most exciting time I’ve ever seen in the enterprise. I’ve always thought tech was interesting, but now it’s the whole world.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s wall-to-wall coverage of Google Cloud Next. (* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google Cloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE