Google LLC’s cloud business is reorganizing its professional service offerings into a new, centralized portfolio called Google Cloud Consulting.

The move was announced today. It follows a year in which Google Cloud made significant investments to expand its professional services practice. The practice’s services make it simpler for companies to adopt Google Cloud products, train employees in using those products and build new applications.

“The Google Cloud Consulting portfolio provides a unified services capability, bringing together offerings, across multiple specializations, into a single place,” Lee Moore, vice president of Google Cloud Consulting, detailed in a blog post. “This includes services from learning to technical account management to professional services and customer success.”

According to the company, the launch of the Google Cloud Consulting portfolio has two main objectives. 

First, it aims to help companies more easily procure professional services from the search giant. According to Google, customers will have access to a detailed description of each service in its catalog as well as examples of how it can be used. The goal is to speed up the procurement process for enterprise customers. 

According to the search giant, Google Cloud Consulting will also make it easier for partners to work with its professional service teams. Google has an extensive ecosystem of partners focused on providing consulting services to its customers. A company embarking on a complex cloud project could recruit both Google and a third-party consulting provider to support the initiative. 

According to the Alphabet Inc. unit, the Google Cloud Consulting portfolio includes more than a half-dozen professional services on launch. The offerings span several categories.

Some of the services focus on helping companies deploy Google Cloud products more easily. One such service simplifies the task of adopting Google Workspace. Another is designed to ease the task of moving on-premises business records to BigQuery, the search giant’s cloud-based data warehouse.

A second set of Google Cloud Consulting services focuses on helping companies optimize existing cloud environments. The company’s employees can, for example, work with an enterprise to check whether its cloud environment contains vulnerable security settings. 

The Google Cloud Consulting portfolio also includes training offerings. It can equip a company’s administrators with the skills necessary to set up and manage Google Cloud environments. Training offerings also cover more specialized topics, such as how to build artificial intelligence applications using its Vertex AI suite of machine learning tools.

“As we look forward to 2023, we’ll continue to expand the service catalog and focus on making it even easier to find and transact these services, and further streamline the experience of engaging with our services,” Moore detailed. 

Image: Google