SAN FRNACISCO – Google has evolved drastically over the past year. Not only have the productivity applications for business been rebranded and brought together with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) portfolio under a cohesive business unit in Google Cloud and leadership under Senior Vice President Diane Greene, but the resulting business has substantially furthered its messaging as well.

The pervasive enterprise messaging was present at Google Cloud’s Next event, in customer success stories and support announcements, as well as the go-to-market strategy presented to analysts.

  • VIDEO RECAP: Watch a 4-minute recap of the Google Cloud Next event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW9VCYgSxlQ

Though Google Cloud is gaining share in the enterprise cloud space, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and IBM present well-established competition.

Event overview

Google’s cloud-focused conference has similarly evolved over the past year. Graduating from a tent on Pier 48 in San Francisco to the Moscone Center in and of itself shows a massive progression of the event. More importantly, however, the focus of the event expanded from just GCP to all of the freshly branded and increasingly cohesive Google Cloud business, and boasted an exponentially larger expo of Google Cloud partners and product demos.

Together, the evolution of Google’s strategic cloud organization and conference exemplifies the drastic improvements it has made to its portfolio of cloud offerings and sets the tone for accelerated enterprise adoption of the integrated cloud products that will persist through the rest of 2017 and beyond. At the center of Google’s push for cloud primacy are two things Greene called out during her keynote speech when she stated, “The cloud with the best technology is the best cloud. …

But all that great technology needs a customer focus.” Google aims to stand out from competitors by complementing its strategic technology innovations with a customer focus that prioritizes enterprise-grade support and an optimal balance of low prices and high performance.

Addressing enterprise need for hands-on support

Paramount to supporting enterprise adoption, and playing to a weakness in AWS-delivered services, Google Cloud launched logical engineering support variations that will appeal to enterprise need for high-touch support and predictable pricing. Customer Reliability Engineers, an expansion on Google’s long-proven Site Reliability Engineers, were lauded at the event by current enterprise customers as unique, differentiating and extremely valuable resources that set Google Cloud apart from its peers. As a further extension of this hands-on support model, Google unveiled tiered engineer-to-engineer support that gives customers access to responsive engineers when needed, but at a consistent, predictable monthly flat cost that only varies if a customer chooses to change the engineer’s response level.

Google positioned this as drastically different from other services, where vendors charge customers a percentage of their monthly (variable) bill. TBR sees this as a compelling selling point for enterprises that want to count on predictable expenses and receive responsive engineer support. Pre-empting questions about the scalability of this hands-on support, Google also announced Pivotal and Rackspace signed on to support GCP customers.

Maintaining simple, low pricing

Already recognized as a cloud provider that excels at offering low-cost services in a straightforward manner, Google emphasized its low-cost and simplified pricing by offering additional cost reductions to customers. Similar to competitors’ structures, Google Cloud extended its free trial period from 60 days to 12 months, and designated a base layer of certain products to be indefinitely free up to certain usage thresholds, dubbed “Always Free.” These extended trials of free services will enable potential customers to become more familiar with the increasing functionality of Google Cloud products and test various workloads on the cloud before committing whole projects, as Google is winning the growing majority of competitive engagements it enters but admits it needs to be brought into more engagements to effectively accelerate growth. Similarly, typical price reductions, automatic sustained use discounts, new committed use discounts and recommendations on possible cost savings continue to benefit Google Cloud customers.

TBR notes that Google Cloud has capitalized on market perception that AWS’ billing is complex and gets unwieldy quickly by offering simpler pre-use commitment discounts. While offering customers large discounts for estimating their usage one or three years in advance can benefit some customers, it also moves Google Cloud toward more complex pricing that may begin to intimidate some adopters. As long as Google Cloud strategically maintains its low, simplistic pricing and discounts for customers, the firm will remain a top-of-mind vendor for low-cost cloud services that are easy to allocate across various projects.

Part Two: Democratizing artificial intelligence and more

(C) TBR