“Google Cloud revenue rises 52% as crisis forces tech giant to temper hiring and spending - GeekWire” plus 2 more
“Google Cloud revenue rises 52% as crisis forces tech giant to temper hiring and spending - GeekWire” plus 2 more |
- Google Cloud revenue rises 52% as crisis forces tech giant to temper hiring and spending - GeekWire
- Google’s hybrid cloud platform Anthos hits general availability for AWS, in preview for Azure - VentureBeat
- Google Cloud and YouTube Help Protect Alphabet From a Coronavirus Disaster - The Motley Fool
| Google Cloud revenue rises 52% as crisis forces tech giant to temper hiring and spending - GeekWire Posted: 28 Apr 2020 02:20 PM PDT  Google Cloud revenue increased 52% to $2.78 billion in the first quarter, helping Google parent Alphabet beat Wall Street's revenue expectations even as the company's broader advertising business struggled amid the economic downturn. The cloud division includes Google Cloud Platform as well as its G Suite productivity and collaboration tools and other cloud services for businesses, some of which have seen a surge in usage as people around the world work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company plans to slow down the pace of hiring for the remainder of 2020, maintaining momentum in "a small number of strategic areas," said Sundar Pichai, the Alphabet and Google CEO, on a conference call with analysts and investors. The company is also "recalibrating the focus and pace" of investments in areas including data centers and non-essential marketing and travel, he said.  In the first quarter, the company's total headcount rose by more than 4,100, to 123,048 employees. Google Cloud posted the largest employee increase among the company's product groups, in both technical and sales roles, said Ruth Porat, the company's chief financial officer, on the conference call. In a memo to employees on Monday, reported by Business Insider and CNBC, Pichai said that "everyone who is in a recommended or mandatory work-from-home status should assume that will continue until at least June 1, 2020." He added, "Not everyone at a site will go back all at once – expect the return to be staggered and incremental." Google Cloud operates a large engineering center in Seattle, in a new campus that it opened last year. It's the first of three tech giants with major cloud platforms that will report earnings this week. Microsoft reports earnings on Wednesday, and Amazon on Thursday. The revenue increase in Google Cloud was driven by "significant growth" in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and "ongoing strong growth" in G Suite, Porat said. She added that the growth rate in GCP was "meaningfully higher than that of Cloud overall," led by infrastructure offerings and Google's data and analytics platform, adding that Google Cloud saw new traction in areas including health care, media and communications, and supply chain optimization. RELATED: Google is getting a bigger grid: G Suite chief on Microsoft, Zoom and the new world of collaborationGoogle Meet, video-conferencing technology for businesses, is now adding about 3 million users daily, Pichai said on the conference call. That's up from a rate of 2 million new daily users announced by the company each month. Google Meet is part of G Suite, and it has been adding new features to better compete with rivals including Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Alphabet's overall revenue rose 13% to more than $41 billion for the quarter, ahead of Wall Street estimates of $40.3 billion. Profits were $6.84 billion, up 27%, or $9.87/share, short of estimates $10.36/share. "Performance was strong during the first two months of the quarter, but then in March we experienced a significant slowdown in ad revenues," Porat said in Alphabet's earnings news release. We are sharpening our focus on executing more efficiently, while continuing to invest in our long-term opportunities." Alphabet shares rose more than 4% in after-hours trading.  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 22 Apr 2020 09:32 AM PDT  Anthos, Google's platform for managing hybrid clouds that span Google Cloud and on-premise datacenters, has hit general availability for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is in preview for Microsoft Azure. Additionally, Google today updated Anthos Config Management with a programmatic and declarative GitOps approach to manage policies for traditional workloads, and Anthos Service Mesh with support for applications running in virtual machines. In short, Google is expanding Anthos to support more kinds of workloads, in more kinds of environments, and in more locations. It's all part of Google's bigger plan to catch market leaders AWS and Azure. Anthos is a service based on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that lets you run your applications unmodified via on-premises datacenters or in the public cloud. Anthos hit general availability just over a year ago, at Google Cloud Next 2019. At the time, Google announced that Anthos will run on third-party clouds, including AWS and Azure. The company is now delivering on that promise, meaning teams can work across platforms and not worry about vendor lock-in. Many businesses already have their applications and projects spread out across on-prem and multiple public clouds. Anthos is supposed to be a common management layer that lets Google Cloud customers continue to use their existing investments. Google is pitching Anthos as an architecture that lets businesses weather, or even take advantage of, change. That idea has always appealed to businesses, but it might be particularly enticing amid the current uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anthos supporting multi-cloud means businesses can now consolidate all their operations across on-premises, Google Cloud, and other clouds, starting with AWS. Next up, Azure. "Given [that] we have seen a lot of demand for multi-cloud support, we hope to release the GA of Anthos for Azure later this year," Google Cloud VP Jennifer Lin told VentureBeat. Anthos Config Management and Anthos Service MeshVB Transform 2020 Online - July 15-17, 2020: Join leading AI executives at VentureBeat's AI event of the year. Register today and save 30% off digital access passes. Google today also announced deeper support for virtual machines. Businesses can now extend Anthos' management framework to two pieces of traditional workloads. Anthos Config Management offers policy and configuration management, letting you use a programmatic and declarative approach to manage policies for your VMs on Google Cloud, just as you do for your containers. This reduces the likelihood of configuration errors due to manual intervention and speeds up time to delivery while ensuring your applications are running with the desired state at all times. In the coming months, Anthos Service Mesh will let you manage services on heterogeneous deployments. That means support for applications running in virtual machines, letting you manage security and policy across different workloads in Google Cloud, on-premises, and in other clouds. Later this year, Google promises you'll be able to run Anthos with no third-party hypervisor. That should improve performance, reduce costs, and eliminate the management overhead of another vendor relationship. Demanding workloads that require bare metal for performance or regulatory reasons will also be possible. Bare metal additionally powers Anthos on Edge, letting you deploy workloads beyond your datacenter and public cloud environments. Switching to AnthosIn July, Google launched Migrate for Anthos, which lets you take virtual machines from on-premises or Google Compute Engine and move them directly into containers running in GKE. Migrate for Anthos got an update today that lets you simplify day-two operations and integrate migrated workloads with other Anthos services. If all of that sounds great, it's because Google Cloud is pulling out all the stops to woo businesses. The company has reportedly given itself a deadline to pass Amazon or Microsoft by 2023, and Anthos is part of that bigger plan. And yet Google hasn't figured out how to be transparent about Anthos pricing. That could be a sticking point for many businesses in today's economy. "We have multiple flexible pricing options, and Anthos pricing options are evolving as the market matures and our solution evolves," Lin told VentureBeat. "Because enterprise buyers are much more familiar with doing procurement through sales contacts and partners, we wanted to give our customers the fastest way to start a purchasing discussion, and thus we are directing people to contact sales for specific pricing."  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Cloud and YouTube Help Protect Alphabet From a Coronavirus Disaster - The Motley Fool Posted: 03 May 2020 11:47 AM PDT Some investors have criticized Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)(NASDAQ:GOOG) for being the least diversified among the tech titans. Microsoft has its software, cloud, and hardware empire; Apple practically prints money-making devices and has a burgeoning services segment riding sidecar; and Amazon.com has e-commerce cornered, plus the lead in cloud, and a myriad of other services. But Alphabet has ads, most of which are derived from Google. Sure, it has Google Cloud and YouTube, but the assumption was they were insignificant factors. Turns out that's far from the case. The company started breaking down its results to show Cloud and YouTube during its final report from 2019, and it continued to shed light on its highest-growth businesses to kick off 2020. The ad business took an unsurprising hit due to coronavirus lockdowns, but things weren't as bad as they could have been.  Image source: Getty Images. Google Cloud and YouTube to the rescueAlphabet CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the quarterly update on Tuesday with some comments regarding the crisis, noting this is the first time a pandemic (and resulting recession) has taken place in a digital-first world. Though many businesses are taking a serious beating due to shelter-in-place and work-from-home orders, other areas of the economy are proving resilient even as social behaviors get disrupted -- perhaps permanently. Ad revenue grew year over year through February before declining to a mid-teens percentage rate after the lockdown was put in place in mid-March. However, Google Cloud saw another massive increase in sales as businesses scrambled to put continuity plans in place to keep operations running, and to pace surges in web and internal network traffic. Pichai rattled off a long list of organizations Google Cloud is helping, from the State of New York to e-commerce powerhouse Shopify to AT&T. Cloud is helping many companies transform their processes, but many others have been using Google's G Suite of cloud-based tools for a long time. The subscription service now boasts over 6 million paying customers. YouTube did pretty well, too, and while ads on the platform reversed course late in the quarter, annual growth merely decelerated to a high-single-digit percentage rate in March. And the "other" segment notched big gains, driven by YouTube's new subscribers (like TV and Music) and higher usage of the Play app store. The "other bets" investment portfolio was a drain on the bottom line, but progress was made on that front as well. The Waymo autonomous vehicle business raised $2.25 billion in its first outside investment raise, and Wing autonomous delivery saw traffic rise by five times thanks to test programs in Virginia and Australia. All told, the Alphabet family did pretty well considering the dark clouds hanging over.
Data source: Alphabet. Google ads are down, but certainly not outBut what of the primary driver, Google search and resulting ads? Expect a rough Q2 report card as the bulk of COVID-19 disruption is going to show up during that period. Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat weren't ready to expound on specific numbers Google is seeing in April, but it may not be as ugly as some investors had feared. Pichai expounded:
The flexibility to quickly turn Google search ads off and on, and the cost-effectiveness of running those ad campaigns, thus means a quick rebound in results is likely in store once things begin to normalize. Plus, digital advertising is still on a long road to becoming the dominant and preferred method of advertising around the globe. Coronavirus is certainly going to be a speed bump, maybe a big one, but Google search and ads business is still in growth mode. But the real deal sweetener is that Google is quickly becoming a diversified high-growth company, with multiple levers to pull to propel its results higher. The tech giant remains a portfolio staple in my book.  |
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