TECHnalysis Research Blog Extra

September 30, 2016
Google Updates Their Cloud Offerings

By Bob O'Donnell

One of the few areas where Google is noticeably behind their competitors is in the area of cloud offerings for business. The company has been seen as a much smaller player than Amazon, Microsoft or IBM for quite some time, but they made some announcements this week to step up their cloud solutions.

Notably, the company switched to the imitative but obvious name Google Cloud for its key hosted products. In addition, it consolidated its Google Work for Business and renamed Google Apps for Work to G Suite. The net result is that, along with new management in the form of Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), the company now has a unified set of offerings under a single umbrella name.

Along with the rebranding, Google announced a number of enhancements to G Suite. Many of the new capabilities leverage machine learning and AI-type efforts to create new features. For example, for people who don’t understand how to do formulas in their Sheets spreadsheet app, Google is starting to incorporate more natural language processing that can convert text requests into formulas.

Google also announced Team Drives, a new app that’s optimized for storing and sharing files across a team of workers. The bottom line is that Google, like Apple, is making a renewed pitch into the enterprise because growth in the consumer market has stalled or even started declining. It remains to be seen how successful the company can be for business applications and services, but clearly there are focused efforts to try and create new opportunities.

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.