Enterprise Cloud FEATURED ARTICLE

Enterprise IT has changed a lot with the emergence of the cloud, and Google (News - Alert) wants its cloud infrastructure to be the dominant platform for enterprise IT the way it currently rules the ads business. A host of announcements show that Google means business.

Currently Google lags far behind Amazon when it comes to enterprise cloud. Amazon has 31 percent of the public cloud market, according to Synergy Research, compared with only 7 percent for Google. Even Microsoft (News - Alert) has a bigger slice of the public cloud pie, with 9 percent.

Many businesses are still moving to the cloud, however, so there’s plenty of room for growing market share; Google’s cloud business grew 108 percent year-over-year while Microsoft’s cloud business grew 124 percent, according to Synergy (News - Alert) Research. Amazon had a healthy growth of 63 percent, too, showing that there still is plenty of opportunity out there.

To capture more cloud business, Google announced last week that it is releasing a beta version of its Google Stackdriver, a service for monitoring, alerting and visualizing cloud deployments both on its own Google Cloud Platform and Amazon’s AWS service.

Google also is opening access to its Cloud Machine Learning tools, which allows developers to incorporate machine learning capabilities such as voice and image recognition in applications using REST APIs. It is build using Google's open source TensorFlow machine learning library.

The Cloud Speech API is now also available from Google, which enables enterprise developers to perform speech-to-test conversion in more than 80 languages, a move that will challenge speech recognition firm, Nuance (News - Alert).

Further, Google is enhancing its big data toolkit with long-term storage and other improvements that is intended to woo enterprise customers.

I’m not sure who doubts that Google is serious about the cloud, but the company wanted this fact to be crystal clear when it made the announcement. Eric Schmidt (News - Alert), CEO of Google parent, Alphabet, noted that the company has invested $9.9 billion in capital expenditures in 2015, and will continue investing in cloud infrastructure this year.

Google has long relied on its ad business for the lion’s share of its profits. There are signs that the company thinks enterprise cloud could be its second major line of business. And they may be right, although there’s still much work to be done before it catches up with Amazon.