Google’s Cloud Platform products have gotten a lot of updates recently which all seem to point at the search giant’s ambitions to take on Amazon Web Services. The current moves by Google will also pit it against some other heavy weights in the infrastructure-as-a-service sector including Windows Azure, Rackspace, HP, and OpenStack.
A positive point for Google is that it has the global footprint, resources and ability to price their services lower than all competitors except for Amazon. Google will need to figure out how to beat Amazon in a number of key areas including its large lead in creating a developer friendly environment and having very detail oriented services. Google will need to either price its services cheaper than AWS or develop a service that is a lot better than Amazon’s in order to dislodge it from its dominant position in the market.
Another move for Google would be to redefine the sector so that it has an advantage. According to Chris Potter, co-founder of ScreenLight, a way to do that is to “build on its strength of developing highly scalable web and mobile applications. While all of its competitors focus on selling infrastructure as a service, Google could pair that with pay-per-use API services that could be linked together by developers to build upon.”
According to Potter if Google gives application developers and enterprise customers a set of tools that are a pre-built solution the move to the cloud can be made easier and a lot faster for customers. An API-based service that is easy to use and well made gives developers the time to focus on what differentiates their product instead of redoing work that others have already developed. Also, getting a number of API services from one provider like Google can save money and time that would be spent testing and checking pricing for a number of different providers. Potter says that, “Google API services could provide a secure, reliable, and trusted foundation for development.” He adds that, “Google has unique strengths when it comes to building scalable cross-platform web and mobile services. None of the other IaaS or PaaS providers, including Amazon, have demonstrated true capabilities in this area.”
Potter suggests that Google should look at Accelerated Data Transfer to help users get their data quickly into the cloud. This a current bottle neck that needs addressing. He also points at Video Encoding as an opportunity. He claims that developers are looking for cheap ways to store, encrypt, encode, manage, and stream media content. Real-Time Communication is another opportunity area according to Potter especially using the Google+ Hangout software. He also points at Speech Recognition and offering it as an easy to use cloud based service which any developer can add to their application.
Source: TechCrunch
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