Google LLC rebranded its Cloud Services Platform today under the name of Anthos, the Greek term for “flowers.”

Anthos will have general availability on 30 launch partners, including Cisco Systems Inc. and Dell EMC, according to Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian, raising hopes that the hybrid platform will blossom into a multicloud engine that can drive the company’s quest for enterprise business.

Google’s quest for enterprise in the cloud remained the key issue for many analysts on the opening day of its cloud conference. “There are questions about whether Google can move beyond search and Gmail and really be a big cloud player for enterprise,” said Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the opening day of the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. “That really is the elephant in the room. Can Google really innovate and attract CIOs?”

Vellante was joined by John Furrier and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, and they discussed Google’s recent announcements, the potential to grow its enterprise business, new services for the developer community and continued speculation around potential acquisitions (see the full interview with transcript here).

App migration service announced

As part of the platform news today, Google also released Anthos Migrate to enable the movement of on-premises applications to the cloud. It’s a beta service that will move virtual machines with other cloud platforms into the Google Kubernetes Engine.

“If Anthos Migrate actually works, that’s going to be a tell sign to me on how fast Google can take territory,” Furrier said. “Enterprise is not that easy. Google has found out the hard way.”

Google also unveiled a new serverless compute platform for containerized applications called Cloud Run. While the move could be greeted positively by the developer community, some analysts wondered if Google was simply trying to catch up after falling behind.

“I’m a little bit concerned that Google is so deep into containers and Kubernetes, they’re looking for Knative to connect the pieces, but they’re a little bit behind in some of the next generation architecture built on serverless for developers,” Miniman said.

Missing from the busy day of news was any move to acquire new businesses. “They didn’t get GitHub, they didn’t get Red Hat, so who will Google pick up?” Miniman asked.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE