谷歌亮出云服务大杀器

最近，谷歌亮出了大杀器，显示自己想在云服务领域跟Amazon Web Services（AWS）和微软认真较量一番。

在旧金山的谷歌云平台全球用户大会上，谷歌首席执行官桑德尔•皮查伊、谷歌母公司Alphabet董事长埃里克•施密特以及谷歌负责企业业务的高级副总裁黛安•格林齐齐亮相，目的就是向全世界宣布，谷歌已经准备好为各种公司提供服务，甚至包括那些大企业。

格林在接受《财富》杂志采访时表示，如果有人印象里谷歌云平台还没瞄向大公司，这种看法很快就会改变，“如果不是认真的，我根本就不会加入谷歌。我来这儿就是为了云平台，让我激动的就是这个。”

格林曾是VMware的联合创始人和首席执行官。这家公司是虚拟服务器领域的开拓者。据估算，80%的大公司数据中心都在使用VMware的虚拟化解决方案。因此，格林对企业客户有一定的了解。她在谷歌担任了四年的董事，去年11月被任命为高级副总裁。

本次大会被视为谷歌的全员亮相新闻发布会，意图证明该公司的云服务已经为“黄金档”做好了准备。谷歌披露的云服务新增客户包括家得宝和迪士尼的消费品部门。谷歌还再次宣布，一直使用AWS和Microsoft Azure服务的可口可乐已经开始使用谷歌云平台。

可口可乐等公司正在转向公共云服务，也就是从类似谷歌的供应商手里租用大量服务器、存储空间和网络设备，这样就不必扩充内部数据中心的容量。

不过谷歌云平台的亲密关系网里还缺一些大型的新金融公司、保险公司以及其他机构用户。SAP和甲骨文等大型软件公司的应用有没有获得在谷歌云平台上运行的授权，也还不清楚。毕竟使用这些应用的大企业需要在云平台上获得相应的支持。

格林承认，跟大公司建立合作关系是谷歌下一步工作的重中之重。

不过，大公司的暂时缺席并不代表会上展示的技术缺乏亮点。谷歌展示了供外部人员使用的新人工智能（即机器学习）产品。现在，第三方开发商可以像谷歌一样利用新技术打造自己的应用，比如语音识别软件。在机器学习技术的帮助下，应用可以自我调整或“学习”，而不需要开发人员的帮助。

谷歌还展示了一款名为Kubernetes的工具，可以帮助企业用户把应用部署在自己的服务器或者谷歌云上。大多数公司都想采用把应用拆分的混合模式，一部分放在自己的数据中心里，一部分放在类似谷歌云平台的公共云上，这样可以保证对某些数据和应用的控制。

谷歌推出的云产品中还包括Stackdriver，可以监视、记录并诊断AWS服务器、谷歌云服务器以及私有云上的性能问题。

负责技术基础设施的高级副总裁乌尔斯•霍尔茨勒介绍了谷歌的均衡负载技术。他说，这项技术可以实现计算任务的跨地区分配。霍尔茨勒指出，AWS和Azure没有类似功能，对要在多个地区提供服务的消费领域初创企业以及需要解决本地性能问题的跨国公司来说，做到这一点都很重要。

技术对谷歌来说一向都不在话下。但谷歌的软肋一直在于似乎不知道怎么向大公司推销产品。在大企业，做采购决策的不是开发人员，而是高管。

云行业顾问MSV•简纳基兰姆在周三的展示过后指出：“谷歌应该画幅蓝图，然后讲讲故事。在场的人都没看懂对Kubernetes的演示，他们搞得太技术流了。”

谷歌正在扩充咨询团队，以帮助合作伙伴和顾客了解怎样使用谷歌云服务，情况可能会有所改善。不过，这个团队不会发展成IBM式的专业服务部门……格林表示：“建立咨询团队主要是为了获得用户反馈以及协助合作伙伴。虽然我们没打算在咨询业务上赚钱，但也不想亏钱。”

格林没有透露咨询团队已经招了多少人。

公平地说，云服务领域的发展还相当初级。目前大概只有5%或者8%的信息技术存在云端。如今谷歌已经奋起直追。尽管AWS已经发展了10年，但谷歌还有大把时间赶上。

对一些云服务商来说其实业务发展潜力巨大，不过，大多数分析师都认为公共云市场比较小众，只属于AWS、Azure和谷歌云平台。高德纳分析师道格拉斯•图姆斯指出，鉴于谷歌资源众多，其云业务有“无限长”的起飞跑道，也有可能对更知名的竞争对手形成挑战。（财富中文网）

译者：Charlie

审校：夏林

Google pulled out the big guns to show that it’s deadly serious about being a big-boy cloud competitor to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google; Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet; and Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google’s enterprise efforts, were all on hand at Google’s cloud conference in San Francisco to tell the world that their company is ready to serve businesses of all sizes. Even the big ones.

Any impression that Google Cloud Platform isn’t targeting big businesses, will change quickly, Greene told Fortune in an interview. “I never would have joined Google full-time if it wasn’t serious. That’s what I’m here for, it’s what excites me.

Greene was co-founder and chief executive of VMware, the pioneering server virtualization company. VMware virtualization runs in an estimated 80% of all big company data centers, so Greene knows something about enterprise customers. She has been a director at Google for four years and was named senior vice president in November.

Coming into this event, which was seen as Google’s full-court press to prove its cloud is ready for prime time, the company claimed new cloud customers including Home Depotand Disney’s consumer products division . It also re-announced that Coca-Cola, an AmazonWeb Services and MicrosoftAzure account, is also using Google Cloud.

Companies like Coca-Cola are turning to public cloud—massive collections of computer servers, storage and networking—that they rent from a provider like Google. By doing so they don’t have to build more internal data center capacity.

Still missing from Google’s dance card is a list of big new financial, insurance, and other institutional users. Nor was there any sign from big software players like SAP SAP -0.09% or Oracle ORCL -1.52% that their apps are certified to run on Google cloud. That sort of applications support is still needed for the biggest companies that run those applications in-house.

Greene acknowledged that getting those kinds of partners aboard is a huge priority.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a lack of impressive technology on display. Google demonstrated a new artificial intelligence artificial intelligence (aka machine learning) product that it’s making available to folks outside of Google. Third-party developers can now use the new technology Google itself used to build its own speech recognition and other applications. With machine learning the application itself adjusts or “learns” without help by human developers.

Also demonstrated was a tool called Kubernetes that can help companies deploy applications on their own computer servers or on Google’s cloud. Being able to divvy up applications between a company’s own data center and a third-party cloud is the hybrid model that most companies aspire to use because it lets them retain control of some data and applications while putting others into a public cloud like Google Cloud Platform.

Also boosting Google’s hybrid cloud portfolio is Stackdriver, which monitors, logs and diagnoses performance issues on AWS servers, Google cloud servers, and on a private cloud.

Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, talked up load balancing technology that he said will distribute computing workloads across regions. That technology, which he said AWS and Azure does not offer, is important both for startups in the consumer space that must serve many geographies as well as large multinational companies that need to address local performance issues.

But technology has never been Google’s problem. Its Achilles heel is that, to date, it doesn’t seem to know how to sell this stuff to big businesses where executives, not developers, make the buying decision.

Cloud consultant MSV Janakiram spelled it out after Google’s demonstrations on Wednesday: “Google needs to paint a picture, tell a story. No one in that room could understand the Kubernetes demo—it was too geeky.”

It may help that Google is ramping up consulting staff to help partners and customers learn how to use Google cloud services. This will not become a big IBM-style professional services business, however. . “It’s mostly a mechanism for customer feedback and enabling partners. We are not planning to make money with professional services, although we don’t want to lose money on them,” Greene noted.

Greene would not specify how many people have been hired for this services push.

To be fair we’re still fairly early on here. Maybe 5% or 8% of all information technology has been deployed to cloud thus far, and Google is on its way so there is still plenty of time even though AWS has now been around for 10 years.

There is a ton of potential business for several cloud players, although most analysts see the market as narrowing to a big three of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google on the public cloud side. And, given Google’s massive resources, it has an “endless runway” to grow its own business, and perhaps challenge its more established rivals, according to Gartner IT -0.64% analyst Douglas Toombs.