This article is based on reporting originally published by cloudwars.co in January 2020.
Google Cloud Picks Up the Pace Against Microsoft and Amazon
In the fiercely competitive enterprise cloud market, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian opened 2020 with four rapid-fire moves designed to accelerate growth, deepen enterprise credibility, and close the gap on market leaders Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon (AWS). Individually, none of these announcements is a single knock-out blow. Taken together, they reveal a coherent, multi-front strategy to position Google Cloud as a serious contender for enterprise workloads at scale.
Kurian, who took over as Google Cloud CEO in early 2019, had already made a name for himself by overhauling the organization’s go-to-market approach, tripling the size of its global sales team, and placing a much stronger emphasis on customer outcomes rather than just technology capabilities. The four January 2020 moves are a direct extension of that transformation.
The Four Key Moves
1. Acquiring AppSheet: Empowering Citizen Developers
Google Cloud announced the acquisition of AppSheet, a no-code application development platform that allows non-technical business users—often called citizen developers—to build and extend applications without writing traditional code. The deal plugs a meaningful gap in Google Cloud’s developer tooling portfolio, particularly for enterprise customers who want to digitize workflows without relying entirely on professional engineering resources.
In the acquisition announcement, Google Cloud’s Business Application Platform VP Amit Zavery cited a Forrester Wave report (Q2 2019) describing AppSheet as having “the most aggressive strategy and roadmap for empowering business people as developers,” with particular strengths in mobile app development, data design, application scaling, and documentation generation.
For Google Cloud, AppSheet represents a direct response to Microsoft’s Power Platform—a suite of low-code tools including Power Apps and Power Automate that Microsoft has aggressively promoted across its enterprise customer base. By adding AppSheet, Google Cloud gains a comparable entry point into the fast-growing low-code and no-code market segment.
2. IBM Power Systems Partnership: Bridging Hybrid Cloud Gaps
A day before the AppSheet announcement, Google Cloud revealed a strategic partnership with IBM centered on IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud. The partnership targets a common enterprise pain point: many large organizations run mission-critical workloads—including SAP ERP systems and Oracle databases—on IBM Power Systems hardware, and have found it difficult to migrate or extend those workloads into public cloud environments without sacrificing performance or reliability.
The IBM partnership addresses this directly by allowing customers to run IBM Power System servers within Google Cloud’s infrastructure, combining trusted on-premises hardware with the scalability and economics of the public cloud. Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud’s Corporate VP of Global Ecosystems, explained the value proposition this way:
“IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offers a path to do just that, providing the best of both the cloud and on-premise worlds. You can run enterprise workloads like SAP and Oracle on the IBM Power servers that you’ve come to trust, while starting to take advantage of all the technical capabilities and favorable economics that Google Cloud offers.”
Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP of Global Ecosystems, Google Cloud
This move strengthens Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud story at a time when hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are increasingly the default architecture for large enterprises, rather than the exception.
3. Premium Support Overhaul: Signaling Readiness for Mission-Critical Work
One area where Google Cloud has historically lagged AWS and Azure in enterprise perception is support quality and reliability assurances. The third move—an enhanced Premium Support offering—directly addresses this concern.
VP of Cloud Support Atul Nanda described the updated service as delivering several improvements:
- Consistency across Google Cloud Platform and G Suite support plans, reducing confusion for customers using both products.
- Competitive feature parity with support tiers offered by AWS and Microsoft Azure.
- Simplified pricing compared to previous Google Cloud support packages.
- Intelligent systems including third-party technology support, a Support API, and recommendation engines.
- Context-aware customer interactions designed to personalize and optimize the support experience.
For enterprises evaluating cloud platforms for mission-critical workloads, support quality and SLA guarantees are often as important as raw technical capabilities. By upgrading its premium support tier, Google Cloud signals that it is serious about competing for workloads where downtime is not an acceptable outcome.
4. Airtel Partnership: Accelerating Growth in India
The fourth move focuses on geographic expansion. Google Cloud announced a partnership with Bharti Airtel, one of India’s largest telecommunications providers, to offer G Suite (now Google Workspace) to small and mid-sized businesses across India through Airtel’s distribution network.
India represents a large and rapidly growing technology market, and reaching SMBs through an established telecom partner gives Google Cloud a distribution advantage it would struggle to build independently in the short term. Kurian was quoted in a livemint.com report as saying: “The combination of G Suite’s collaboration and productivity tools with Airtel’s digital-business offerings will help accelerate digital innovations for thousands of Indian businesses.”
The Airtel partnership illustrates a broader theme in Kurian’s strategy: using regional partnerships and ecosystem relationships to extend Google Cloud’s reach into markets where direct enterprise sales forces take time and money to build.
What These Moves Reveal About Google Cloud’s Strategy
Viewed individually, each of these announcements addresses a specific competitive weakness or market opportunity. Viewed together, they paint a clearer picture of Google Cloud’s strategic priorities under Kurian:
- Developer platform expansion — AppSheet broadens Google Cloud’s appeal beyond professional developers to a much larger population of business technologists.
- Hybrid cloud credibility — The IBM partnership acknowledges that most large enterprises will not move entirely to the public cloud overnight, and that hybrid architectures are here to stay.
- Enterprise-grade trustworthiness — Upgraded premium support addresses a reputational gap and signals readiness for workloads where reliability is non-negotiable.
- Global market expansion — The Airtel partnership demonstrates that Google Cloud is investing in geographic growth through ecosystem relationships, not just direct sales headcount.
Google Cloud enters this competitive period with real structural advantages: global brand recognition, the financial backing of Alphabet, and a genuinely strong technology platform in areas like data analytics, machine learning, and Kubernetes (which Google originally developed). Under Kurian’s leadership, the organization is working to match those technical strengths with the enterprise sales discipline, partner ecosystem, and customer-support infrastructure that large organizations require before committing significant workloads to any cloud provider.
Whether these moves are enough to meaningfully close the market share gap with AWS and Azure in the near term remains to be seen. But the pace and coherence of Kurian’s execution in early 2020 suggests Google Cloud intends to compete seriously for the enterprise market—not just participate in it.
Key Takeaways for Enterprise Teams Evaluating Cloud Providers
- If your organization runs SAP or Oracle on IBM Power Systems, the Google Cloud–IBM partnership is worth evaluating as a hybrid cloud on-ramp.
- Teams exploring low-code and no-code development platforms should now include AppSheet (as part of Google Cloud) alongside Microsoft Power Platform in their evaluation criteria.
- Organizations that previously dismissed Google Cloud due to enterprise support concerns should re-examine the updated Premium Support tier against your specific SLA requirements.
- For businesses operating in or expanding into India, Google Cloud’s partnership distribution through Airtel may simplify procurement and local support.