Google Wants in On Oil
Google Cloud is looking to strike big with a partnership in the oil industry, stating that they can handle data storage, movement, and AI-based data analysis better than the oil companies can. The company has even created a group called the Oil and Gas Unit that is designed to court the oil and gas industry.
This wouldn’t be the first major deal between the two industries— Chevron Corp. signed a seven year deal with Microsoft in October. But many in the energy industry are hesitant to partner with Silicon Valley for fear of them one day becoming competitors.
Darryl Willis, the VP of Google’s Oil and Gas Unit and former BP PLC employee of almost three decades, believes that the future of the energy industry is in the cloud. Willis said that energy companies only use 5% of the data that they collect and implored them that switching is almost a necessity. Willis stated, “Companies will either be a catalyst for change, or they will be a casualty of change.”
Target Aims its Sights on Google Cloud
Google has announced at its Google Next 2018 conference that it is teaming up with the major retailer Target to migrate key aspects of their business to the cloud. This news comes after previous reports from last year, stating that Target was in the market for a new cloud provider.
We’ve seen quite a few cloud/retail partnerships recently, as this announcement comes a few days after Walmart confirmed that they and Microsoft had partnered up for 5 years. Target and Google are also both major competitors of Amazon. Are they looking to give Amazon and AWS a run for their money? We’ll be keeping an eye out for you.
Campbell Soup Cooks Up With Microsoft
Looks like Target isn’t the only company ready to partner with a cloud provider. Things have also been cooking between Campbell Soup and Microsoft, announcing that the US based canned soup producer had chosen Azure to modernize its IT platform.
The company is moving to a hybrid cloud system in order to make-up for where the company lacks in security. The CIO of Campbell stated that migrating to the cloud will enable the company to re-architect itself according to evolving business needs.
Quarterly Earnings Reports are In
The reports are in as a number of major cloud providers are tallying up their earnings for the quarter— major cloud players like Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba among them. Microsoft reported their revenue for the last quarter was $6.9 billion, and are up 50% in constant currency. Their cloud revenue for the last 12 months was over $23 billion.
Though Google doesn’t report a 12-month revenue figure on a quarterly basis, they do report for the quarter itself. Google’s revenue came in at $4.4 billion for the quarter— note that this number includes Google Cloud offerings as well as hardware, apps and in-app purchases, and Google Play Store sales.
Alibaba reported their cloud revenue to be $699 million, growing 103% year-over-year for the quarter. Their fiscal yearly revenue is also up 101% landing at $2.1 billion. To dive deeper into Alibaba as a cloud provider check out our Alibaba Cloud Report on Liftrnews.com and make sure to keep an eye on the Liftr Index for any changes throughout the week.
