Google Cloud partners with Accenture on enterprise cloud
Wed 25 Jul 2018
Google has announced it is partnering with major consultancy firm Accenture to form the Accenture Google Cloud Business Group, which will specifically target enterprise clients.
Coinciding with Google’s enormous cloud conference, Google Cloud Next, at which Diane Green, CEO of the ad giant’s cloud division, has outlined her plans for cloud domination, the announcement builds on an existing partnership between the two firms.
According to a blog post by Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President for Google Cloud, enterprise businesses have told the firm that ‘partners with deep cloud expertise’ would be useful to them. In particular, they want help with migration strategies designed specifically for their industry or business.
The new business group will consist of cloud experts from both companies, who will help big businesses with their cloud migration strategies. Initially, the teams will deal mostly with retail, consumer packaged goods and healthcare companies, but they say that they intend to expand.
The services that Accenture and Google intend to provide would certainly triumph in a game of cloud buzzword bingo: customers can take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to create new business processes, modernise infrastructure, improve customer experience, and use Google’s G Suite to ‘reimagine work.’
Google Cloud’s plans
In spite of the buzz and fluff, the partnership is part of a serious attempt by Google to get in with enterprise customers as AWS and Azure continue to grow and capitalise on their strengths.
Google clearly considers one of its strengths to be the tools and ‘smart’ features that it already boasts as part of its stable. Speaking at the Google Cloud Next conference yesterday, Green proclaimed that artificial intelligence is the ‘number one opportunity’ in the cloud, while other execs praised the impact of products like Kubernetes.
Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, said: “Cloud computing is still missing something – a simple way to combine the cloud with your existing on-premise infrastructure or with other clouds. Eight out of ten enterprises today have a multi-cloud strategy.”
It’s this complexity and difficulty that some companies are seeing as a profitable space in the cloud market, with companies like Rackspace banking entirely on managed services and offering its expertise to companies that aren’t sure about managing their cloud journey.
But with Google offering up its suite of ‘smart’ tools in the G Suite, selling expertise in the form of partnerships like this with Accenture, and going for a bite of the infrastructure pie, it seems to be gunning for the whole cloud ecosystem.
