Google Cloud customers doubled their spend with channel partners in 2021, claims CEO

But despite Google Cloud revenue increasing 45 per cent in the fourth quarter, it continued to make an operating loss

Partners helped to accelerate Google Cloud's growth last year as sales surged 45 per cent year-on-year in the fourth quarter despite the public cloud giant continuing to make an operating loss, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2021 hit $5.5bn for Google Cloud, parent company Alphabet's results show, but it racked up losses of $890m - which has been cut from $1.2bn compared with the fourth quarter of 2020.

Pichai said Alphabet's backlog had increased "more than 70 per cent to $51bn" in Q4 which can mostly be attributed to Google Cloud, while total deal volume for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) rose 80 per cent for the full year compared with 2020.

The CEO praised the role of partners in growing Cloud revenues, claiming that customer GCP spend through channel partners more than doubled in 2021.

"Our partner ecosystem is helping accelerate our growth," he said.

"For the full year 2021 compared with the full year 2020, the number of customers spending more than $1m through the marketplace increased by 6x.

"Customer spend through channel partners on GCP more than doubled, and the number of active certifications within our top global systems integrators more than doubled as well."

Google also revealed in the results that it had "completed an assessment of the useful lives" of its servers and network equipment - adjusting the estimated useful life of its servers from three years to four years and the estimated useful life of certain network equipment from three years to five years.

Google's CFO Ruth Porat said the tech giant remains focused on investing in Cloud to turn it into a profitable business after another quarter of losses.

"2021 represented another year of substantial growth," she said on the results earnings call.

"Our investments in our go-to-market organisation, product innovation and partner ecosystem have been paying off as we help customers with their digital transformation.

"While Cloud operating loss and operating margin improved in 2021, we plan to continue to invest aggressively in Cloud given the sizable market opportunity we see.

"We do remain focused on the longer-term path to profitability and over time, operating loss and operating margin should benefit from increased scale."

Overall, Alphabet's fourth quarter revenue jumped 32 percent to $75.3bn compared with the fourth quarter of 2020 with net income of $20.6bn.