Google has announced a slew of strategies in a bid to take on the likes of its competitors – Amazon and Microsoft. These announcements were made at an invitation-only gathering at its cloud computing conference called Horizon, that took place in San Francisco on 29th September, 2016.

Here’s a look at some of the key strategic changes.

“Google Cloud” is the new name

If you’ve been using any cloud platform from Google, you’ll be thrilled to know that it’s going to be called Google Cloud from now on. Though the functionality doesn’t change at this point in time, the new name is definitely more encompassing and relevant.

According to Diane Greene, Senior Vice President, Google Cloud, this new name will be an umbrella term for any Google Cloud Platform, all user facing and productivity applications that use the cloud, machine learning tools, APIs, Android devices that access the cloud, and pretty much anything that is built for the cloud.

Also, G Suite is the new name for productivity apps like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps for Work.  Google also announced that it has introduced artificial intelligence capabilities in G Suite to help employees work more efficiently.

So, why this new name? Well, it’s not a complete surprise as this idea was in the pipeline for some time now. Greene believes this name change will send a positive signal to its customers that Google is serious about its cloud offerings. Also, it is more descriptive and less unwieldy when compared to Google Enterprise or Google for Work.

Launch of BigQuery

Urs Holzle, the Senior Vice-President of Technical Infrastructure at Google, launched a new feature called BigQuery for Enterprise. This feature, available in Google Cloud, will allow users to create a full data warehouse based on their needs. This move is seen as the answer for Microsoft’s SQL Data Warehouse and Amazon’s RedShift cloud data warehouse.

New data centers

Google also took this opportunity to reveal the location of eight new data center regions, and they are: Mumbai, Finland, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, and Sao Paulo. A new region for its Cloud Platform is expected to be announced within a month. The addition of these new centers reflect the growing might of Google in the public cloud market. Though it is trailing behind Amazon and Microsoft, Google’s revenue increased by 33 percent in the last quarter, and analysts attribute much of it to gains made in the area of cloud computing.

Partnership with Accenture

Google has entered into a partnership with Accenture to bring to market advanced cloud solutions that’ll help customers to improve their business performance and to accelerate their digital transformation. These solutions will be industry-specific to meet the needs of clients in areas such as finance, healthcare, consumer products, energy, and retail. This partnership is also expected to give Google Cloud a wider reach among corporate customers.

With these strategic announcements, Google is all set to close the gap with its competitors. The next few months will give a clearer picture of the impact of these new strategies.

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