Great Next-pectations: key takeaways from this year's Google Cloud event

The vendor unleashed a host of product updates and new features at its annual Next event in London last week. CRN casts its eye over what has been a game-changing year for the cloud provider

Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian's maiden speech as CEO promised we would see an "aggressive" approach for customers and market share from the vendor this year, and the company certainly did its best to live up to that commitment.

Former Oracle exec Kurian's first year as chief exec ushered in a raft of fellow channel veterans in leadership positions, and its flagship hybrid cloud offering Anthos, as well as parent company Google throwing its weight behind a channel push.

Attendees at its recent Google Next event at the ExCel Centre in London saw a spate of announcements from the public cloud provider, stressing its determination to grow in the cloud market space against bigger rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

We analyse the main messaging from Next and what it means for the cloud provider's strategy.

Keeping it secure in Europe

The most exciting aspect of the recent Next event to some partners was the focus on security. Kurian and VP of security Suzanne Frey made security a key element of their keynote contributions, announcing new security tools External Key Manager and Key Access Justification which Frey claimed adds "another layer of transparency" to its cloud.

Perhaps this emphasis on security by the cloud provider was a result of its parent company Google's massive £44m fine for breaching GDPR earlier this year, but more likely it is to show that it can compete just as effectively as its bigger rivals.

In particular, Kurian seemed determined that attendees understood Google Cloud's presence and operations in Europe, highlighting that all European customers' data, including primary, secondary and backup, will be stored in one of its six European zones and how the aforementioned products will assist in their security.

"We're giving European customers a cloud that helps you control where your data sits, who accesses it and who operates it, and it's designed to meet the strictest regulatory requirements here in Europe," he stated.

David McLeman, CEO of Google Cloud Premier Partner Ancoris, welcomed this move.

"Some of the announcements they've made around security have really been about making certain that there are no questions about their credibility in the enterprise space," he told CRN.

The cloud provider's recent acquisition of VMware specialist CloudSimple - which it claimed will allow enterprise customers to "run what they want, when they want and how they want" - goes hand in hand with its security push, according to Kurian.

"The reason we're doing this [security play] is that customers are moving more mission-critical workloads to our infrastructure," he said.

"They [CloudSimple and security] are part of our commitment to give you a secure, reliable, high-performance infrastructure to run both our application workloads as well as partner applications.

"In order to build the future, we provide you with a number of tools to make it easy to bring your existing estate to the cloud."

Taking on the big guns

Google Cloud has long trailed behind market leaders AWS and Azure in gobbling up market share, but there has been a marked change in the vendor since Kurian took over from Diane Green at the beginning of the year.

Google's parent company Alphabet has traditionally been shy about disclosing how its cloud business is doing during quarterly reports, but this year has seen a change in attitude.

It still does not disclose Google Cloud's revenue, but it has started talking about how it is doing, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai declaring it is growing at a "significant rate" in its most recent earnings report and previously stating that it has hit an annual revenue run rate of $8bn (£6.2bn).

He also vowed earlier this year that the channel would be an "important" focus for the company.

Ancoris' McLeman said the shift better positions Google Cloud in the market and gives it more clout than it previously did among the public cloud providers.

"When you look at Google compared with Amazon and Microsoft, I think Google's really all about helping people change the way they work and change their businesses," he explained.

"Customers want partners to take them on their digital transformation journey, to improve their agility and speed as a business and to help gain insights into their data. Put together, these all play to Google's traditional strengths and so they're very well differentiated.

"They're firmly established and they are hiring at a huge rate. I think there's plenty of room for all three of the big players, but I think Google is really growing and taking share at the moment."

Anthos-ology

The vendor's much-vaunted Anthos offering, which was launched at the US Next event earlier this year, saw a series of updates announced at the London show.

Migrate for Anthos has become generally available. It converts physical servers or virtual machines from a range of sources, including on-prem, AWS or Azure, directly into containers running in Anthos or Google Kubernetes Engine.

Also now generally available is Cloud Run for Anthos which brings the benefits of serverless to container-based applications.

Jennifer Lin, director of engineering at Google Cloud, claimed that Anthos makes cloud migration and application modernisation simpler.

"Hybrid offerings, including recent announcements in the market, try to build on top of legacy silos that can't quite deliver the agility and governance across clouds," she stated.

"As customers look to the cloud for scalability and access to innovative services, getting locked into a single vendor has become a major concern. But with Anthos you have the flexibility to monetise without being locked in.

"We have a strong ecosystem of partners who are working with us to create innovative solutions developed with Anthos."

Google Cloud Evolution

Ancoris has been a "pure Google play" partner for 11 years and McLeman says that the changes brought in by Kurian enable partners to capitalise on its momentum in the cloud market.

"What's happening today is that you're seeing all the big players starting to enter the arena - Accenture, Atos, SAP, VMware on the on the ISV side - and that's all just expanding the market for us," he explained.

"Google is now moving to a 100 per cent partner-attach model and we're seeing that reflected in increased numbers of referrals from Google as we move forward.

"As a specialist player, the majority of our customers are mid-market or enterprise players; there's plenty of room for specialist players like ourselves."

Forrester analyst Adam Schlegel told a press roundtable that from his research, several partners he originally surveyed in 2016 have seen triple-digit growth in that time span by taking advantage of Google's expanded portfolio.

"We talked to partners across the globe that work in a bunch of different engagement models; resellers, service providers, those building their own IP and those doing all three," he explained.

"We found that the partners that did a little bit all across that spectrum were really growing their business and revenue outcomes significantly."

He added that hyper-specialisation by partners is critical to a vendor's ecosystem, as they grow faster than their generalist counterparts.

"One of the things that's very unique about the Google Cloud ecosystem is that partners are carving out a niche where they serve a very specific business function," he said.

"Over the last three years, there's been a huge shift and acceleration in what we've seen with these specialised partners; they're growing faster than they were and doing larger deals.

"A lot of that is testimony to the fact that these proof of concepts that were around three years ago are now production-level workloads, and these partners are able to span."

Watch the video to hear more of David McLeman's thoughts on this year's Google Next UK