Google reorganizes cloud services under new ‘Google Cloud’ brand

Today at its Horizon business-oriented cloud computing conference, Google announced the launch of the Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, but also Google Apps for Work, enterprise versions of Android and Chrome OS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services. This amounts to a significant rebranding in the Google division of parent company Alphabet.

In addition to the overall cloud name change, the Google Apps for Work portfolio — which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google+, Google Calendar, Google Hangouts, Google Forms — is now going by the new name G Suite.

“Google Cloud isn’t only the products, it is also how we work alongside companies, in an engineering-centric way,” Google cloud chief Diane Greene wrote today in a blog post. “Digital transformation and moving to the cloud are technical processes, we have customer engineers, customer reliability engineers, site reliability engineers, product engineers, all there to partner with our customers as they migrate, deploy and evolve. Our approach and our commitment to Google Cloud customers is simple: We’re in it together.”

Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure at Google, announced the launch of BigQuery for Enterprise service within the Google Cloud Platform. “You can now update tables that turns it from an analytics solution into a full data warehouse,” Hölzle said. This represents a new challenge to public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers the Redshift cloud data warehouse. Microsoft Azure, another major Google Cloud Platform competitor, has the SQL Data Warehouse.

Google also revealed the locations of eight new data center regions: Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt. Google will be announcing a new data center region for its Cloud Platform around once a month, Hölzle said.

And the previously announced Cloud Machine Learning Platform service is now available in beta, Hölzle said. It was first announced at Google’s GCP Next conference in March and has been in limited preview since then.

Also today Google said the Google Cloud Platform now has more than 1 billion users, right up there with Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, and YouTube. Google’s public cloud customers include Coca-Cola, Evernote, Home Depot, Philips, Snapchat parent company Snap Inc., and Niantic Labs, the company behind the Pokémon Go app. Partners include major consulting firm Accenture.