{"id":21302,"date":"2016-03-21T15:02:05","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T15:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businesscloudnews.com\/?p=247292"},"modified":"2016-03-21T15:02:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T15:02:05","slug":"google-said-to-be-on-cloud-shopping-spree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/google-said-to-be-on-cloud-shopping-spree\/","title":{"rendered":"Google said to be on cloud shopping spree"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Googlers<\/a>Google is rumoured to be planning the acquisition of a number of businesses to bolster its cloud computing platform and suite of workplace applications.<\/p>\n

According to Re\/code<\/a>, the tech giant has amassed a short-list of various start-ups and niche service providers including automated app services start-up Metavine, e-commerce public company Shopify, and payroll and health benefits services business Namely. Re\/code sources have stressed that the approaches are preliminary, and none of the companies involved have commented on the rumours.<\/p>\n

The moves seem to address two challenges currently facing the Google team. Firstly, there is a notable gap of \u2018middle range\u2019 customers for Google Apps. The company traditionally does well with small and large companies, but has struggled with the lucrative market in between. Last year<\/a>, Google attempted to lure the middle market onto Google Apps for Work by offering the service for free while seeing out their current enterprise agreement, and then $25 per user after that point.<\/p>\n

Secondly, the acquisitions would enable Google to move its internal systems to its cloud platform, potentially creating a more solid offering to challenge AWS and Microsoft Azure.<\/p>\n

The reports back-up recent moves in the market which indicated Google\u2019s intentions of increasing its stake in the cloud market. While AWS and Microsoft have been firmly planted as the number one and number two players in the public and private cloud space, Google is closing the gap, making a number of company and talent acquisitions to improve its proposition.<\/p>\n

Aside from the recent hire of VMware founder Diane Greene to lead its cloud business, last year SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs H\u00f6lzle highlighted<\/a> that Google cloud platform revenues could surpass Google’s advertising revenue within five years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020,\u201d said H\u00f6lzle in October. \u201cOur cloud growth rate is probably industry-leading…and we have lots of enterprise customers, happy enterprise customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rumours shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise, as H\u00f6lzle also said that there would be a number of announcements which would \u201cremove any doubt\u201d from Google\u2019s future plans.<\/p>\n

While the approaches are rumours, GCP Next 2016, the company\u2019s cloud developer user conference taking place this week, may provide some clarity to Google\u2019s aspirations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google is rumoured to be planning the acquisition of a number of businesses to bolster its cloud computing platform and suite of workplace applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344,1976,524,3410],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","category-news-analysis","category-public-cloud","category-sme"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21303,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21302\/revisions\/21303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}