DeepMind, a London-based startup Google acquired that focuses on artificial intelligence, could be a core part of Google's resurgence in cloud computing. AI can make almost anything more efficient, including data centres. In turn, this means that Google can allocate its time, money, and resources more efficiently.
According to Google, applying DeepMind's AI prowess to its own data centres reduced energy usage by 15% – and it can likely do the same for others.
"[DeepMind] certainly gives Google an edge," Mustafa Suleyman, the head of applied artificial intelligence at DeepMind, told the New York Times. "Other people focused on narrow problems. We've focused on the widest possible problem."
Productivity plusses
Google also has something Amazon lacks: a fully featured enterprise suite of productivity applications. Like Office, which is developed by Microsoft, Google Docs – and related apps such as Sheets, Forms, and so on – offer ways for users to create documents, slideshows, or spreadsheet files which can then be edited by a team simultaneously online.
For business users, the features that Google offers are incredibly useful, and packaging its cloud platform up with Docs, as Google currently does, will likely attract some big clients.
The company has recently begun focusing even more heavily on the needs and wants of big business, adding in extra collaboration features for Docs while bolstering security and permissions access for different levels of employee.
Microsoft recently announced that around 23 million people use Office 365, the cloud version of its productivity suite, highlighting the potential scale of the market Google could capture. 23 million may seem like a lot, but it's only a fraction of the potential user base available.
Indeed, it's estimated that the whole market for cloud computing will expand to $67 billion (around £51 billion, AU$88 billion) in 2020, up from $23 billion (around £18 billion, AU$30 billion) last year, according to Gartner. That's an awful lot of growth that could go to Google rather than Amazon or Microsoft.
Committed to the cloud
Google's commitment to the cloud extends to hiring personnel, too. The company employed Diane Greene, a sought after industry expert, to run its cloud business and the results are noticeable. Since Greene came on board, Google has ramped up its hiring of enterprise-specific personnel, created products specifically for businesses, and much more.
The cloud market is one of the most fertile around, and Google, which has been doing cloud for longer than anyone else, would seem like the prime company to take a controlling share. So far, however, that hasn't happened but, considering recent actions and rhetoric, things would seem to be changing. Only time will tell who triumphs in the cloud arena – but Google would seem like a decent bet.
