Google Cloud’s Gearhart: ‘I’m Committed to Making Partners Succeed’
… higher first-quarter revenue, attributed to pandemic-spurred deployments.
To be sure, the coronavirus pandemic forced organizations worldwide to adopt cloud computing more quickly than anticipated. Industry-wide, observations and projections about cloud’s importance even after COVID-19 abound.
“I believe cloud was the lifesaver of our industry during COVID-19’s disruption,” Avishai Sharlin, division president of Amdocs Technology, wrote for Channel Futures last fall.
In the U.K. alone, 88% of firms surveyed by the Cloud Industry Forum say they’ll increase cloud services adoption throughout this year.
Meanwhile, Synergy Research Group says global first-quarter 2021 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services exceeded $39 billion. That marked an increase of well more than $2 billion compared to the previous three months. It also represented a 37% rise over 2020’s first, pre-pandemic quarter.
Now, analysts said in late April, the cloud infrastructure services market is seeing its third successive quarter of year-on-year growth. That, they said, “is unusual for such a large, high-growth market.”
A slowdown appears nowhere in sight.
Even though organizations shifted to cloud technologies sooner than planned, inviting complications, many now understand the benefits. They can support hybrid or all-remote work without compromising employee productivity. They can save money on overhead (though that’s not to imply that cloud technologies come cheap).
Thus, enterprises and SMBs across the world intend to continue moving to more flexible, accessible, employee-friendly services, infrastructure and applications. Many are doing so with the help of partners. As Gearhart pointed out, examples of this work can run into the dozens, if not hundreds, of citations.
Consider, then, research firm IDC’s assessment last year that Google Cloud partners have prospered greatly over the past year. That trend will continue, analysts found. IDC forecasts that, by 2025, partner revenue from Google Cloud opportunities will more than triple. Over the next six years, accumulated net-new partner revenue will reach $341 billion. Between 2019 and 2025, the breakdown will look like this, according to IDC:
- Resale will account for 27%.
- IaaS, PaaS, SaaS add-ons will make up 26%.
- IT services will comprise another 26%.
- Business services will contribute 15%.
- Hardware and networking support will add up to 6%.
On a macro scale, Gartner says the proportion of IT spending shifting to cloud will accelerate once COVID-19 passes. Analysts there predict that cloud – whether AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or someone else – will make up 14.2% of total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.
“The increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal,’ now more than ever,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.
Yet, all that activity notwithstanding, Google Cloud retains its third-place ranking compared to its competitors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Perhaps, though, Google need not worry.
John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, says there’s enough cloud computing demand to go around. Smaller vendors such as Google Cloud have “some excellent opportunities,” he said.
“Taking Amazon and Microsoft out of the picture, the remaining market is generating over $18 billion in quarterly revenues and growing at over 30% per year. Cloud providers that focus on specific regions, services or user groups can target several years of strong growth.”
Gearhart expects to do just that through the channel. To wit, even though the company trails AWS and Azure, it boasts several exclusive partners and tends to move with more agility than some of its rivals. The company also has been expanding its data center regions and private cloud partnerships, extending coverage options to more potential end users.
“I’m committed to making partners succeed,” she said. Therefore, this year, she added, expect “even more acceleration and resources.”
How will that play out for Google Cloud’s market size? Check back in a few years.
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