Two major giants in the world of cloud computing, Google and Salesforce, entered into a key partnership on Monday.

Under the terms of this agreement, Salesforce’s clients who don’t currently use  G Suite will get this package free for one year. This move is expected to increase the user base of G Suite. Also, Salesforce will add Google’s cloud service to its list of certified partners. Interestingly enough, AWS is on this list as well.

Besides G Suite, Google’s Analytics 360 service will be integrated with Salesforce’s products. This Analytics 360 is a marketing tool that will help Salesforce’s clients to track sales and other advertising-related information. At this point in time, not all Salesforce products have this feature, so it should work well for both companies. This addition of Google’s products is sure to help Salesforce to reach to a wider audience with its products while for Google, it’s a big win obviously because it has access to the entire customer base of Salesforce.

This deal is not so much of a surprise really because earlier this year, a few analysts had predicted that one of the major players can make a bid to acquire Salesforce. One analyst even went to the extent of saying that Google should pay $73 billion to acquire Salesforce. At this point though, there is no mention of a takeover either by Google or Salesforce. In fact, Google even refused to comment on whether it will eventually take over Salesforce.

This deal also represent Google’s strategy to enter into strategic partnerships with other companies to ensure that both the players get mutual benefit through it. In this series, the deal with Salesforce maybe the biggest and could give Google one of the biggest market advantage.

Let’s see how this plays out for both the companies in the short as well as long run.

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In today’s age of intense competition, partnerships seem to be the best way to increase market share. That’s probably why we’ve seen so many companies join hands with others to create a win-win partnership for everyone involved.  The latest in this trend is the partnership between two IT giants – Google and Cisco.

Both the companies announced that they would join hands to help their respective customers create efficient hybrid cloud solutions. Through this partnership, both companies want to bring the power and advantages of cloud to the on-premise environment of their customers. To do this, they would be using the Kubernetes container created by Google. It also looks like they would be using the Istio service mesh for connecting different microservices between clouds.

Though the companies did not go into detail as to how they would implement this idea, we can understand that their solutions will take into the security and policy configurations of their respective enterprise environments and at the same time, will provide the necessary networking and performance data in real-time.

Another aspect that we know is Apigee, the company that Google acquired last year, will act as the medium through which legacy applications can connect to modern applications, and maybe even tap into the power of cloud. This is a good move because there are a ton of legacy applications in the on-premise environment, so it’s important that a fair amount of support is given to these as well.

This partnership has been in the pipeline for some time. Tech people of both the companies have been working together over the past few months to understand the feasibility and planning required to create a combined hybrid cloud. As of now, the plan is to roll out the combined service to a limited set of customers by the first week of 2018 and have it available to the general public by the second half of 2018.

A considerable stake is present in this partnership for both the companies. As for Google, it’s going all out to catch up with its competitors, Microsoft and AWS, who seem to be moving higher with every quarter. As for Cisco, it wants to redefine its business and continue to stay relevant in a changing tech world.

Let’s wait and see how this partnership plays out to both these tech giants as well as the general public at large.

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Cloud Firestore is yet another cloud product from the stables of Google.

Firestore is a new database service for Firebase, Google’s app platform for developers. Firebase has been fairly popular with developers because it helps you build apps on the Google cloud platform without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure. This way, you have the flexibility to focus on the functionality you want and at the same time, you get a world-class platform for deployment. In addition, you also get the necessary insights and analytics that can be shared across all Google’s products.

Another salient aspect of Firebase is that it gives developers access to a real-time database that is effectively managed and scaled by Google. Due to such advantages, Firebase has caught on well with developers.

This new Firestore database is sure to make Firebase a more attractive choice for developers, as it complements the existing Firebase Realtime Database. IN fact, if you look closely, there’s quite a bit of overlap between these two databases.

So, why do we need Firestore?

Over time, Google realized that developers hit some issues during the process of development and these issues could not be solved with the existing realtime database. This is why a new service was introduced, so it could ease these pain points and make the development process more enjoyable and productive for developers.

Realtime databases, in general, come with many limitations. First off, it can’t handle a ton of complex queries and secondly, the platform itself was architected to have a limit of 100,000 connected devices. Some of the largest Firebase’s customers hit this limit fairly quickly, and this means, they are forced to spread their database among different shards. All this negates the use of a realtime database and makes them a lot less effective.

Firestore was introduced to overcome these limitations.

Some critics argue that an easier way is to redesign the realtime database completely. But that’s easier said than done as it would entail a lot of time and resources. Instead, the Google team chose to build another database that would overlap the existing database, and at the same time, will be free of the existing limitations.

In addition, Firestore gives the choice to build offline apps using the local database for web, iOS and Android platforms. Users can also sync data across apps in real time, and this adds to the attractiveness of Firestore.

To top it, small customers don’t really have to make the switch to Firestore right away.

Overall, this is a good move by Google and one that could boost the usage of Google cloud platform.

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India continues to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and a substantial part of it is driven by the IT industry. While India is known as the software capital of the world, what is relatively unknown is the demand it is fueling for cloud services. In fact, the public cloud services market is expected to grow by 38 percent in 2017, amounting to a total of $1.81 billion this year. In 2016, it was only $1.32 billion. By 2020, these numbers are expected to reach $4.1 billion.

These numbers show the rapid strides that India is making in the cloud industry. So, it’s little wonder that all major cloud services companies are making a beeline to this country.

Google Cloud is one of the early entrants into the Indian market and it is continuing to expand its presence here. Already, it has helped many companies to make the transition to cloud services. A case in point is Hike Messenger. This company was India’s own version of the popular Whatsapp messaging service. It is estimated that there are about 100 million registered users for this app and more than one billion messages are exchanged every day. Recently, this company has expanded its services and is offering new ones like Hike Wallet and Hike News.

This company runs on the Google Cloud Platform. In a Google summit held in India, the Vice-President of Engineering and Technology at Hike Messenger, Vishvanath Ramarao, said that there is a 30 percent increase in speed after Hike migrated to the Google Cloud Platform. He further opined that Google Cloud gives Hike the flexibility to scale with efficiency, thereby reducing their time  to market.

Besides Hike, it looks like other Indian companies have also gained immensely by using Google Cloud. Some examples include Ashok Leyland, Delhivery.com, Royal Enfield, Tata Sky, Walnut and more. Such high adoption rates has helped Google to register almost a 3X growth over the last 12 months.

Currently though Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leader in the Indian cloud market, followed by Microsoft Azure. Google stands third in terms of both market share and revenue.

To take on competition from these two players and also to get a larger slice of the prospective Indian cloud market, Google is taking many proactive steps. One of the important measures is to setup a cloud region in the Indian city of Mumbai by the end of this year.  This way, it’s customers can enjoy low latency and fast speeds. Both AWS and Azure have local datacenters already, so Google is a little late here.

Also, it’s moving actively to have a role in government and banking projects, in addition to building a diverse cloud ecosystem geared for Indian businesses.

Let’s see how much of these translate into higher revenue and market share for Google.

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Google Cloud has acquired a company called Bitium for an undisclosed sum, and this company is soon expected to become a part of the Google Cloud team.

Bitium was founded in 2012 and it provides identity and access management service for its customers. With this product, customers can give their employees a single access credential for using multiple applications like Google apps, Office 365, CRM, marketing tools, social media and more.

Also called as single sign on (SSO), this product gives customers greater security than before as IT administrators have a centralized process to control employees’ identity throughout the organization. At a time when insider activity is becoming an increasing cause of breaches, this is definitely a product that can control that.

In addition, customers need to remember only one set of username and password details to access all applications. As a result, this product from Bitium offers a high level of security and flexibility for organizations to manage their employee access and identity.

From an organization’s point of view, it’s a great way to reduce nefarious and “shadow IT” activities by its employees, as they can readily access many cloud-based applications.

These advantages are what caught Google’s attention too.

With this acquisition, Google plans to continue the good work that Bitium is doing, but all that will now happen under Google’s name. Going forward, Google plans to extend this application to its partners as well. At the same time, it plans to keep this application open for third-party providers, so that they can integrate it along with Google Cloud and G suite.

The larger reason for this acquisition is to take on competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Repeatedly, research has shown that cloud security is one of the factors that deter companies from moving to the cloud, With such an identity and access management system, cloud security is greatly increased as the chances for employees to access unauthorized content is greatly reduced. Google hopes that such an increased security can enthuse more customers to opt for Google Cloud over that of AWS and Azure.

Overall, this looks like a good move for Google as it can get the much-needed edge that it’s looking for against its stronger opponents – Amazon and Microsoft.

But, how it translates will be interesting and time will best judge the impact of this acquisition on Google’s customer base and profitability.

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