Google Targets Microsoft, Amazon in Latest Cloud Moves

Google Cloud Services appears poised to trigger fresh competition with two of the top providers in the market today.  Tuesday, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), announced the acquisition of Orbitera.  Industry watchers put the price tag above $100 million. Orbitera was a startup helping other startups market their software to companies.  The purchase appears to be Google’s response to Microsoft’s launch of AppSource, a similar service to Orbitera that connects Office 365 with Azure services.  But that’s not the only move by Google this week.

Google is trying to break into the Top 2 of cloud services.  But those spots are currently held by Amazon Web Services at #1, and Microsoft Azure at #2.

New Cloud Price War?

Google is also reigniting a price fight with industry leader Amazon.  Tuesday, Google cut the price of its preemptible virtual machines by up to a third.  The service competes with Amazon’s spot instances for AWS.  Both provide virtual CPU’s to companies in need of additional, short-term computing power.

“We believe that the price reduction for Preemptible VMs will unlock even more computing opportunities and enable you to tackle interesting science and business problems.” Said Michael Basilyan, Google’s product manager.

No doubt, this will force Amazon to respond in an ever growing battle over personal and enterprise cloud computing.  Because with each passing year, the cloud market increases by the billions and these three companies want as much of it as they can get.

Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview that cloud computing must be Microsoft’s priority now.  “If companies don’t change,” said Nadella, “they’re not going to be around.”  It is a belief that other tech giants are certainly embracing as well.  As the revenue grows, the competition will become more fierce.  The hope is that will benefit professional customers and consumers in the form of lower prices and better services.  The fight for the cloud will only escalate from here.