Google Cloud Keeps Getting Better via Partnerships
Google Cloud is determined to challenge AWS and Azure for the dominance in the cloud market and has been partnering aggressively to do so. A few days ago, Google announced that its bringing native services for Elasticsearch, Kibana and Trifacta to Google Cloud. The strategy of supporting up and coming enterprise platforms as native cloud services might pay strong dividends for Google Cloud in the short term.
By native cloud services, we are referring to capabilities that can be provisioned and scaled without any knowledge of the underlying VMs and infrastructure( just like ground up Google cloud services). AWS, Azure and Bluemix support the provision of many thind party technologies as pre-configured VMs. However, only a small number of platforms are available as native cloud services.
The partnership with Elastic will enable products such as Elasticsearch and Kibana as native cloud services. The offering will also include graph analytics, alerts, commercial support as well as other capabilities of high-end Elastic subscriptions. The new service should be comparable to AWS-s which enables as Elasticsearch native service in addition to its own Amazon Cloud Search service. Azure only offers Elasticsearch as preconfigured VMs as a complement to its Azure Search services.
The partnership with Trifacta is even more interesting. Offering trifacta as a native service will expand Google Cloud with one of the most innovative data quality management platforms in the market. data quality services is a feature notably missing from the AWS and Azure platforms.
Partnership with hot enterprise software startups and offering its capabilities as native services can help to rapidly advance the feature set of Goggle Cloud in areas in which its been railing the competition. Following that logic, there are other markets and partnerships that should result interesting for Google Cloud.
Integration: MuleSoft
Integration is one of the most important capabilities sill missing from Google Cloud. Offering a technology such as Mulesoft’s CloudHub as a native service could bring one of the most sophisticated integration platform as a service(iPaaS) to Google Cloud. Integration services would also give Google Cloud an edge in the iPaaS market over its top competitors. Currently, Azure offering LogicApps which is still very limited compared to CloudHub while AWS doesn’t have any relevant iPaaS capabilities( CloudHub does run on AWS).
In addition to a potential partnership, MuleSoft market traction makes it an interesting acquisition target for Google.
IOT: GE Predix
Internet of things(IOT) capabilities is another area in which Google Cloud has been trailing competitors such as AWS, Azure and Bluemix. However, it could be challenging for Google Cloud to find a suitable partnership in this area as most relevant IOT platforms are already offered as cloud services not compatible with Google Cloud. GE Predix is a notable exception to this rule with a hybrid, Cloudfoundry-based IOT platform that can enable industrial IOT capabilities in Google Cloud.
Blockchain: Ethereum, Eris Tech
We should expect Google Cloud to soon launch a blockchain as a service ( BaaS) offering to competed with AWS, Azure and Bluemix’s capabilities in the space. Ethereum and Eris Tech as well as emerging blockchain-based PaaS such as BlockStack or Nxt could be considered strong candidates for partnerships with Google Cloud.
