At its Next conference in San Francisco. Google outlined some of the ways it is using a $30-billion investment to increase its footprint in the enterprise cloud sector.
There’s little question that Google has brought its enterprise focus and concentrated spending to its Google Cloud Platform late in the game. Before, it was banking on reputation, a minimal offering of its preferred technologies and its basic infrastructure to lure web-based companies and startups to Google Compute Engine and App Engine.
But minimal effort is a thing of the past. Google pulled out its big guns and big customers in San Francisco this week to try to convince the business world that it’s serious about serving the enterprise. The shift in that direction started with the hiring of VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene in November 2015. Greene addressed about 10,000 attendees at the Moscone Center or four times as many as last year as Google’s Next 2017 conference got underway March 8-10.