Google’s eighth employee and overall cloud boss, Urs Holzle, believes that revenue from Google’s Cloud Platform will exceed that of Google’s advertising in the next five years, says a report from Business Insider. Speaking at the Structure Conference in San Francisco, Holzle said the goal is to talk of “Google as a cloud company by 2020.”
Google lags Amazon and Microsoft in cloud
It is a general belief that Google’s Cloud Platform lags Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, who are the leading players in the growing cloud computing market. Google lags because it had to face struggles in forging relationships with the major enterprise customers.
Holzle is aware of the fact that Google is seen as lagging in the enterprise market, which is critical for company’s growth. However, he is confident that it won’t take much time to change, adding the company will soon make some crucial announcement that will do away with all the doubts. Though Amazon has had early success in the cloud, the market is still new, so there’s a lot for Google to do in this field.
Defending Google’s space in the cloud computing market, Holzle said, “we’re clearly coming from behind,” but there’s enough room to get lot bigger. “Our cloud growth rate is probably industry-leading…and we have lots of enterprise customers, happy enterprise customers,” Holzle said. The executive believes there will be much more evolution in the sector in the next five years than in the last five.
Google will be the Android of cloud
Holzle suggests that Google has mastered squeezing more and more resources from its computing infrastructure. This means that Google can continue to increase its performance bar along with offering low prices to its customers. This in turn helps programmers, who will be able to do more at lower costs. This leads to a creation of a curve that eventually benefits all customers.
Holzle compared the cloud evolution with the rise of smartphones, and said the two development paths are similar. Giving the example of iPhones, Holzle said it was first introduced in 2007 and created demand for more smartphones. Though Android started later, it soon became the single most popular operating system in the world. Holzle confidently said Google is going to be the Android of the cloud story.
