SAN FRANCISCO – When it comes to the cloud, Google is taking the long view. Urs Hözle, Google’s Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure, said during today’s Google Cloud Platform Live Conference that, while people using the public cloud make up a minority of developers and IT professionals right now, cloud services will continue to grow rapidly.
“If you think ten years out, there’s no question that a reasonable fraction of the world’s server-side cycles are going to be in the public cloud,” he said.
Hözle said that looking forward, the cloud services business will be “easily bigger” than Google’s advertising revenue as interest in and use of the public cloud continues to grow. That provides a clear answer for why the company is working to compete against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure: if Google isn’t in on the ground floor with the cloud, it may get left behind in the war for cloud revenue.
To try and draw interest in its platform, Google announced massive cuts in the price of its cloud services today, as well as a slew of new features designed to increase productivity and reduce some of the common trade-offs that cloud users run into. According to Hözle, there are more new services coming soon.
He said that the company has spent the past two years re-designing its internal platform to streamline its own services, and Google plans to move those improvements onto its public-facing platform this year.
It’s a crowded market for the company to compete in, facing strong competition from AWS and Azure. But Hözle said that Google has an advantage, since many of its public-facing programs have roots in private tools that run the company’s other services.
