There has been a lot of cloud conferences in the weeks past, providing insightful into the ongoing wars between cloud giants Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Azure cloud and Google cloud platform.
Google, made an announcement at the GCP NEXT Conference in San Francisco, which was an attempt to try and attract developers to its cloud system. The announcement which was highly publicized was made by the top brass at Google and its parent company Alphabet, which included cloud Chief Diane Greene and Alphabet’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt. There was talk of cutting edge new technology available from Google’s cloud, like voice recognition and other features like machine learning API’s. There was also unveiling of a new cloud management tool called the StackDriver. Google announced a big expansion of its cloud system in the world from a small four to 16 regions. Google clearly made a statement that it is an enterprise company.
Microsoft also had their conference this week. The developer conference which was called ‘Build’ featured some lofty new products on day 1. Products like the HoloLens were unveiled, and Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, also explained how in a few short years there would be smart bots prevalent in the world.
Day 2 of the Build conference featured all aspects related to the cloud. The exhibition showed why Microsoft is a big player in the field. The Executive Vice President of the company, Scott Guthrie said the company’s cloud system was signing up 120,000 new users every month. It covers around 30 regions and having at least 1 million servers. Guthrie also noted that five percent of the Fortune 500 companies were using Microsoft Cloud system. He went on to announce the new features implemented in the Internet of Things platform of Azure. Partnership with BMW was also unveiled with BMW’s Vice President, Thom Brennan, speaking about how the motor company had been able to use Azure to power connected driving experience. Other companies using Azure were Accuweather, Electric, and Starbucks, which all mentioned their use of Azure.
Microsoft still continues to put pressure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS). The availability of unique features such as Microsoft Office 365 is a platform that is of huge benefit to the company. It gives a pipeline to sell Azure to its existing customers.
Amazon has been the bigger player in the cloud market and they still loom large. For everything that Microsoft and Google spoke about at the conference, Amazon already has a foothold in it. They might not be the leader in each of the categories, but it shows the battle ahead. The consensus is that from all the announcements Google and Microsoft did in the past weeks, none of them are robust enough to unseat AWS.
