Google touts enterprise capabilities at opening of Next conference

Cloud CEO Diane Greene emphasises importance of partners

Google has talked up its capabilities in the enterprise cloud space on the first day of its Next conference.

Opening the event in San Francisco, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene (pictured) discussed a number of high-profile organisations that have moved their infrastructure to the firm's public cloud, including US retailer Target, and took great delight in announcing to the audience that gaming platform Unify is set to leave Amazon Web Service's cloud in favour of Google's.

"Why choose Google?" Greene (pictured) said at the start of her keynote.

"Here at Google we've been working incredibly hard to build things for you and if you think about it, Google is an enterprise company - we're just a very modern enterprise company.

"Google's business is information. We have a cloud that is built to efficiently take in information, organise it and put it back out with a lot of intelligence and this is what every company needs today."

Greene also stressed the important role that partners will play in Google's public cloud growth - picking out systems integrators such as Accenture as key, but also claiming that there is a place for smaller partners to see success with the firm.

Earlier this year Atos announced Google as its public cloud provider of choice, which partners said proved Google's progress in the enterprise space.

"We do not want to do this alone," Greene explained. "Partners are key to us and our customers and we have several categories. We have some very deep integration and technology partnerships with some of the big enterprise companies.

"We also love our small boutiques and we'll help them with our engineers. Our channel is now over 12,000 partners and we're seeing great engagement."