Dive Brief:
- Google Cloud launched a consulting services unit to support new and existing enterprise customers and provide unified access to ecosystem partners, the company said in a Tuesday blog post.
- Google Cloud Consulting will also provide testing, planning and optimization guidance, engineering expertise and certification training, Lee Moore, VP, Google Cloud Consulting, said in the post.
- The new business unit builds on a consulting practice expansion the company launched last year to help organizations manage hybrid and multicloud deployments and onboard AI, ML and data analytics capabilities.
Dive Insight:
While Bard battles ChatGPT for generative AI dominance, Google remains locked in competition for public cloud market share with rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure.
The three big cloud providers own two-thirds of the global cloud market, but Google is the junior partner, with just over one-tenth of the market, according to Synergy Research Group’s latest analysis.
As part of last year’s consulting practice build-out, Google Cloud tapped Moore — who’d been with consulting firm Accenture for 30 years — to lead customer experience in North America. Google recruited another Accenture veteran, Sunil Rao, to helm cloud product consulting as VP in charge of global delivery and technical onboarding centers at the time of Moore’s hire.
“The Google Cloud Consulting portfolio provides a unified services capability, bringing together offerings, across multiple specializations, into a single place,” Moore said in the blog post.
Those offerings include industry cloud solutions for retail, healthcare and telecom businesses, as well as technical guidance on cloud-based digital transformation.
Microsoft and AWS have similar consulting divisions, including Microsoft Professional Services and AWS Professional Services, which are geared toward enterprise cloud customers. IBM, which trails the hyperscalers in market share, revamped its partnership program in January, aiming to bolster its position in hybrid multicloud and AI.
While inching toward profitability, cloud remained a loss leader for the search engine giant last year. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported nearly $500 in losses during the last three months of 2022, cutting by half the losses reported for the same period the previous year.
Alphabet will report Q1 2023 earnings next week.
