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• Deutsche Bank estimates Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a $750M revenue run-rate estimate today.
• The combined revenues of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP are still less than $15B for a market penetration of just 1%-2% of the Total Available Market (TAM).
• During the 2Q16 call, Google called out cloud as the primary driver of the re-accelerating growth for Licensing and Other revenue, the first time the business has been called out in pole position.
• Recent Orbitera and Apigee acquisitions underscore Google’s new focus and aggressiveness to grow GCP. Google has spent $1B+ on Cloud M&A over the past 12 months.
• Deutsche Bank predicts GCP is preparing a series of new product announcements in September to strengthen their customer-facing roadmap further.

These and other insights are from Deutsche Bank Markets Research study, Google Getting More Aggressive In The Cloud, (client access) published 8 September 2016 by Ross Sandler Karl Keirstead, Deepak Mathivanan, Aki Aggarwal and Taylor McGinnis. Deutsche Bank found that Google is investing heavier in the cloud, making a financial commitment with over $1bn in acquisitions in the past year including the recent Apigee deal. The study is based on interviews Deutsche Bank contacted with channel partners, prospects, partners, and customers. Despite the renewed focus on growth, Deutsche Bank predicts that GCP would continue to trail AWS and Microsoft Azure for the foreseeable future.

Key takeaways of the Deutsche Bank Markets Research survey include the following:

• Deutsche Bank defines the Total Available Market (TAM) enterprise IT spend in nine categories that together account for over a $1T TAM. Deutsche Bank defines the enterprise IT spending market by combining storage, network equipment, infrastructure software, IT outsourcing and support, data management software, BI/analytics, application software and consulting Deutsche Bank sees AWS make significant progress across a wide spectrum of their taxonomy categories.

• GCP new product launches are concentrating on machine learning, data analytics and security, including data encryption and identity and access management. Google’s aggressiveness regarding the cloud is most visible from their new service announcements shown in the table below.  Recent announcements include SQL Server Images, where customers can now natively spin up Microsoft database instances on GCP, akin to AWS RDS for SQL Server. GCP also announced a second generation version of Cloud SQL, its cloud-hosted alternative to MySQL and AWS Aurora. While all of these announcements provide GCP with greater potential to compete against AWS and Microsoft Azure, Google’s two larger competitors have formidable momentum in enterprises.

• Aggressive build-out of global infrastructure locations continues. Google announced during their 4Q15 earnings call they would build 12 new regions in 2016 and 2017. Of the 12 new planned GCP regions, the US Western region in Oregon opened in July 2016, and Google has said that the new Tokyo region will be available later this year, leaving ten more regions to be added in 2017.

• Google continues to believe in the importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Deutsche Bank interviews with GCP customers confirmed interest in using machine learning and artificial intelligence on the cloud. Customers also perceive GCP is well ahead of AWS and Azure in this regard.

• Google is quickly hiring enterprise sales reps in an attempt to close the sales gap between themselves and AWS & Microsoft Azure. Deutsche Bank found that Google has been “hiring very aggressively” to scale its enterprise sales rep capacity and also retrofitting existing sales reps from elsewhere in Google into GCP.

• GCP is gaining share rapidly within the startup community. Deutsche Bank spoke with customers who estimated that 25% startups are using GCP today (with 75% on AWS), while another estimated the ratio to be 20%/80%. While both agreed that a couple of years ago only 10% of startups were using GCP (with 90% using AWS). During the GCP NEXT Asia-Pacific keynote earlier this month Google disclosed that Snapchat “is one of our largest customers,” making up to 2 million queries per second and consuming more Google bandwidth than any other organization except for YouTube.

• Recent Orbitera and Apigee acquisitions underscore Google’s new focus and aggressiveness to grow GCP. Last month Google acquired Orbitera, a small cloud commerce platform. Orbitera simplifies the buying and selling of cloud-based software by providing vendors with packaging and provisioning, billing, and marketplace solutions on AWS and Azure. Earlier this month Google acquired Apigee for $625M, which is 5.2x Apigee’s FY17e revenues of $120M. Apigee is expected to grow by 30%-35% in The company focuses on larger enterprises (Walgreens, Nike, Target, AT&T) and despite an ongoing mix shift to the cloud or SaaS model, it still has a legacy on-premise license/maintenance business.

• Google is very focused on building relationships with all systems integration (SI) firms but that building out a GCP channel is proving to be challenging. Deutsche Bank believes that Microsoft is also finding it tough to build out its Azure channel, in part because many traditional partners and resellers struggle with how they can monetize Azure, given its different price points and the lower services attach rate.