Google Cloud Next: Everything you need to know about the new strategy
CEO Thomas Kurian has made his mark on Google Cloud Platform with a strategy that's enterprise friendly and focused on industries. Here's what you need to know.
Google Cloud Platform CEO Thomas Kurian made his debut as leader of the company and outlined a strategy that will look familiar to enterprise technology buyers.
In fact, some of Kurian's strategy looked cribbed from his alma mater: Oracle. Yes, Google Cloud Platform checked all the boxes at Google Cloud Next. Check out the separated-at-birth slides between Oracle and Google Cloud.
GCP wants to be seen as a digital transformation enabler.
None of this GCP playbook is unique if you're used to buying hardware and software from the likes of Dell, HPE, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, and a host of other vendors. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that GCP is firmly speaking enterprise technology and that reality may finally make it a larger threat to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
On the second day of Google's cloud conference, the company leaned into artificial intelligence and industry specific partnerships.
The biggest AI effort was the launch of AI Platform in beta. AI Platform is a development platform that doubles as a collaboration tool for engineers, developers and data scientists on machine learning projects. The company also launched new versions of Cloud AutoML. The upshot is more enterprise tools to scale AI. (See:Google announces new AI, smart analytics tools)