Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced that Gmail has surpassed 1 billion users per month and that its Google Cloud Platform is used by more than 4 million applications. Pichai also asserted that the Google Cloud Platform “is ready to be used at scale,” and that the company has reached a point where its cloud infrastructure and applications have reached a level of maturity at exactly the time when the broader, industry-wide “movement to cloud has reached a tipping point.” Pichai further noted that Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems, announced its transition to Google Apps last quarter in what amounts to yet another example of the Google Cloud Platform’s readiness to embrace workloads from large organizations and enterprises. Unlike Microsoft and Amazon, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, failed to break out revenue run rate details about its subsidiary cloud business but the company’s appointment of VMware executive Diane Greene to head Google’s cloud services division in November constitutes ample proof of the company’s interest in building out its cloud business. The question now, however, is when and how Google plans to court the enterprise, which has traditionally been dominated by Microsoft and IBM in the enterprise software and infrastructure space. Without more details of its anticipated strategy for gaining traction for cloud products and services in the enterprise, investors and analysts alike will be hard pressed to understand how Google plans to build cloud market share, particularly given continued impressive revenue growth for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s growing ascendancy in the cloud products and services space under CEO Satya Nadella.
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