Dive Brief:

• Google has added a number of high profile cloud customers, including Disney Consumer Products Interactive Media, Coca Cola and Home Depot, the company announced Wednesday at the 2016 Google Cloud Platform Next conference in San Francisco. 
• The company made a slew of announcements at the conference and Diane Greene, Google’s head of cloud computing, argued that Google's cloud platform is ready to compete with cloud industry leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Greene believes customers will choose Google because of its cloud platform's value, risk reduction and innovation. 
• Google has been hard at work growing its enterprise cloud platform, which only had 4% of the market share in 2015, according to Synergy Research, Reuters reports. The company fell behind AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM, which each had 31%, 9% and 7% of the market, respectively. 

Dive Insight:

Google’s cloud business generated about $500 million in revenues last year, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. But that pales in comparison to the $8 billion AWS had in cloud sales in 2015. 

Until now, Google has struggled to make headway with major enterprise clients. But in just the past few months, it’s managed to secure several major deals, including pacts with both Apple and Spotify— companies that previously relied exclusively on AWS for cloud services. Formally announced on Wednesday, Home Depot said it will move some of its data to Google's cloud as well. 

Some attribute Google’s growing success in cloud to Greene, the former CEO and co-founder of VMware, who has extensive experience working with corporate clients.  Google hired Greene last November. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has also been hard at work to squash perceptions that Google isn't serious about the enterprise cloud.

"I think we are at a point now where the product is ready to be used at scale, and so I expect to get significant traction in 2016," said Pichai.

Google also announced several new partnerships and features designed to further improve its standing in the enterprise cloud market during the San Francisco conference. Among them, the company announced partnerships with Splunk, BMC and Tenable, which will help Google expand in areas like IT ops, security and compliance, according to TechCrunch.

Earlier this week, Google announced it was adding cloud data centers in Portland and Tokyo, with plans to expand into 10 more regions, while Re/code reported that Google is looking to buy "middle-market" business in cloud and workplace applications as another key step for winning more enterprise customers.