Dive Brief:

• At Google's annual developer conference, I/O, in San Francisco, company executives highlighted their focus on growing the enterprise business, in part by creating a development ecosystem that allows developers to easily build applications. 

• At the conference, Google announced API partnerships with Salesforce and SAP, in addition to updates to Firebase, its backend-as-a-service platform. The company also unveiled new development APIs for its Sheets, Slides and Classroom applications. 

• The company’s enterprise strategy will include an emphasis on cloud and enterprise devices to help improve business productivity.

Dive Insight:

Google executives told conference attendees that they plan to make new investments and build new partnerships as part of a long-term commitment to the enterprise going forward. By appealing directly to developers, Google could also draw them onto their cloud platform. 

"We're serious about the enterprise," said Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, during an I/O media event. 

Google hired Greene, the co-founder and former CEO of VMware, last November. Greene brought with her enterprise experience Google has lacked in the past. Over the last several months, Greene has been instrumental in helping shift the perception of Google’s cloud business. In Q1 Google managed to secure several major deals, including pacts with both Apple and Spotify—companies that previously relied exclusively on AWS for cloud services. 

"The IT industry is over a trillion dollar industry and we're going to be able to support a huge portion of (it) with Google Cloud," Greene said. "It looks like a big opportunity for Google, and one that really maximizes our strengths in data centers, infrastructure, automation, security, managing data and getting insights from data." 

Google also sees potential in enterprise devices as companies look to improve employee productivity. As the consumer tech market stagnates, more companies are shifting their focus to the enterprise market. Apple has also recently made an effort to break into the enterprise market. Its most recent enterprise effort stems from a new partnership with SAP to create iOS native enterprise apps.