Google rebrands enterprise business as Google Cloud
Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president of cloud, announced Thursday that Google's enterprise business is officially rebranding as Google Cloud.
"We're the full power of Google in the Cloud," said Greene at a San Francisco, Calif., event.
Initially, "we were sort of Google for Work, Google Cloud Platform, Google Apps, Enterprise," she said. The enterprise business, she continued, offers a "uniquely Google broad set of technologies, solutions, products," from Android and secure Chromebooks to the Google Cloud Platform and its machine learning capabilities.
Since Greene was tapped to join Google late last year, the company has made a concerted effort to bring on the corporate clients that Google needs to compete in the cloud space against Amazon Web Services. Since joining, Greene said she's talked to more than 200 of Google's partners and customers. Finally, she said, questions about whether Google is really serious about enterprise have started dissipate.
"If you're going to move to the cloud, who your partner is really matters," she said. "You want someone that really is bold, built for long term ... that's going to keep you on that innovation curve."
Along with the rebranding, Google on Thursday announced new cloud technologies and machine learning tools for enterprise. It also showcased multiple major partners, including Airbus, Home Depot, Snap Inc. (formerly SnapChat), Evernote, Niantic Labs, Telus, Accenture, and Pivotal. Accenture has integrated the Google Cloud Platform into the Accenture Cloud Platform and will support the use of Google tools in industries like health care, retail, energy, and finance.
Other updates to the Google Cloud Platform include a version of Google Container Engine (GKE) that includes the latest Kubernetes features such as the ability to monitor cluster add-ons, one-click cluster spin-up, support for the new Google Container-VM image (GCI) and the ability to build applications that span multiple clouds.
Meanwhile, as the Google Cloud Platform Grows -- it now serves more than one billion end users -- the company is building new Google Cloud regions. On Thursday, the announced they'll have at least eight new regions in 2017 in Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt.
"By expanding to new regions, we deliver higher performance to customers," Google Cloud vice president Brian Stevens wrote in a blog post, noting that Google's recent expansion in Oregon resulted in up to 80 percent improvement in latency for customers.
As Google guns for more enterprise business, it's also stepping up its customer engagement with Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) teams. These teams of Google engineers will work with customers' operations teams to share reliability responsibilites for critical cloud applications.