The COVID-19 pandemic had defined the past few years. For the corporate and enterprise technology spaces, it’s meant an ebb and flow of spending aimed either at staying cautious or innovating to push ahead.

Currently, enterprises are laser-focused on getting more out of their data in a cost-effective manner, according to Rob Strechay (pictured), founder and principal at Smuget Consulting and newly minted guest analyst at theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.

“It’s not only just using the base services anymore,” Strechay said. “They are [companies] looking at how to use these platforms as a service, and some are easier than others. They’re trying to understand how to get more value out of that relationship with the cloud and also consolidating the number of clouds that they have to try to optimize their spend better and to get better pricing for that matter.”

Strechay spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante during a CUBE Conversation from SiliconANGLE Media’s Boston studio. They discussed and analyzed several trends emerging in enterprise computing. (* Disclosure below.)

The tectonic movements within the hyperscaler landscape

Enterprises are bestowed with more choices than ever when it comes to how they use the cloud. This has given them the flexibility to pursue configurations tailored specifically to suit their business-critical end goals.

At face value, organizations are reevaluating and reducing their cloud usage, and this is happening for a variety of reasons, ranging from more powerful on-premises data center hardware (from the likes of AMD) to the preference for usage-specific cloud pricing plans.

“A lot of times, they’re trying to really understand how their business utilizes these clouds and where their spend is going in those clouds,” Strechay explained. “Can they use lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel, or can they get away with AMD or Graviton2 or 3?”

A large part of analyzing the major cloud providers is sifting through their different customer, partner and go-to-market strategies. On the partnership front, Amazon Web Services Inc. seems to be ahead of its competition due to a variety of established integrations, with Microsoft and its Azure offering also making steady gains in building an ecosystem, according to Strechay.

“I think that Amazon has always been there because that’s where the market has been for these developers,” he said. “So many, like Databricks and the Snowflakes, have gone there first because, in Databricks’ case, for example, they built out on top of S3 first. And moving to a different object layer isn’t as simple as one would think.”

Google, on the other hand, is on a divergent path from the aforementioned two. The company is doubling down on its multicloud data warehouse solution, BigQuery, as its headline offering for enterprises. Despite public sector challenges and privacy concerns, the platform is still one of the most used databases globally, Strechay pointed out.

“I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, ‘Is it the best place for me to go?'” he said. “Still, it’s one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of Google services. So you almost get forced into BigQuery sometimes if you want to use the tech on top.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE