最近，谷歌亮出了大殺器，顯示自己想在云服務領域跟Amazon Web Services（AWS）和微軟認真較量一番。

在舊金山的谷歌云平臺全球用戶大會上，谷歌首席執行官桑德爾?皮查伊、谷歌母公司Alphabet董事長埃里克?施密特以及谷歌負責企業業務的高級副總裁黛安?格林齊齊亮相，目的就是向全世界宣布，谷歌已經準備好為各種公司提供服務，甚至包括那些大企業。

格林在接受《財富》雜志采訪時表示，如果有人印象里谷歌云平臺還沒瞄向大公司，這種看法很快就會改變，“如果不是認真的，我根本就不會加入谷歌。我來這兒就是為了云平臺，讓我激動的就是這個。”

格林曾是VMware的聯合創始人和首席執行官。這家公司是虛擬服務器領域的開拓者。據估算，80%的大公司數據中心都在使用VMware的虛擬化解決方案。因此，格林對企業客戶有一定的了解。她在谷歌擔任了四年的董事，去年11月被任命為高級副總裁。

本次大會被視為谷歌的全員亮相新聞發布會，意圖證明該公司的云服務已經為“黃金檔”做好了準備。谷歌披露的云服務新增客戶包括家得寶和迪士尼的消費品部門。谷歌還再次宣布，一直使用AWS和Microsoft Azure服務的可口可樂已經開始使用谷歌云平臺。

可口可樂等公司正在轉向公共云服務，也就是從類似谷歌的供應商手里租用大量服務器、存儲空間和網絡設備，這樣就不必擴充內部數據中心的容量。

不過谷歌云平臺的親密關系網里還缺一些大型的新金融公司、保險公司以及其他機構用戶。SAP和甲骨文等大型軟件公司的應用有沒有獲得在谷歌云平臺上運行的授權，也還不清楚。畢竟使用這些應用的大企業需要在云平臺上獲得相應的支持。

格林承認，跟大公司建立合作關系是谷歌下一步工作的重中之重。

不過，大公司的暫時缺席并不代表會上展示的技術缺乏亮點。谷歌展示了供外部人員使用的新人工智能（即機器學習）產品。現在，第三方開發商可以像谷歌一樣利用新技術打造自己的應用，比如語音識別軟件。在機器學習技術的幫助下，應用可以自我調整或“學習”，而不需要開發人員的幫助。

谷歌還展示了一款名為Kubernetes的工具，可以幫助企業用戶把應用部署在自己的服務器或者谷歌云上。大多數公司都想采用把應用拆分的混合模式，一部分放在自己的數據中心里，一部分放在類似谷歌云平臺的公共云上，這樣可以保證對某些數據和應用的控制。

谷歌推出的云產品中還包括Stackdriver，可以監視、記錄并診斷AWS服務器、谷歌云服務器以及私有云上的性能問題。

負責技術基礎設施的高級副總裁烏爾斯?霍爾茨勒介紹了谷歌的均衡負載技術。他說，這項技術可以實現計算任務的跨地區分配。霍爾茨勒指出，AWS和Azure沒有類似功能，對要在多個地區提供服務的消費領域初創企業以及需要解決本地性能問題的跨國公司來說，做到這一點都很重要。

技術對谷歌來說一向都不在話下。但谷歌的軟肋一直在于似乎不知道怎么向大公司推銷產品。在大企業，做采購決策的不是開發人員，而是高管。

云行業顧問MSV?簡納基蘭姆在周三的展示過后指出：“谷歌應該畫幅藍圖，然后講講故事。在場的人都沒看懂對Kubernetes的演示，他們搞得太技術流了。”

谷歌正在擴充咨詢團隊，以幫助合作伙伴和顧客了解怎樣使用谷歌云服務，情況可能會有所改善。不過，這個團隊不會發展成IBM式的專業服務部門……格林表示：“建立咨詢團隊主要是為了獲得用戶反饋以及協助合作伙伴。雖然我們沒打算在咨詢業務上賺錢，但也不想虧錢。”

格林沒有透露咨詢團隊已經招了多少人。

公平地說，云服務領域的發展還相當初級。目前大概只有5%或者8%的信息技術存在云端。如今谷歌已經奮起直追。盡管AWS已經發展了10年，但谷歌還有大把時間趕上。

對一些云服務商來說其實業務發展潛力巨大，不過，大多數分析師都認為公共云市場比較小眾，只屬于AWS、Azure和谷歌云平臺。高德納分析師道格拉斯?圖姆斯指出，鑒于谷歌資源眾多，其云業務有“無限長”的起飛跑道，也有可能對更知名的競爭對手形成挑戰。（財富中文網）

譯者：Charlie

審校：夏林

Google pulled out the big guns to show that it’s deadly serious about being a big-boy cloud competitor to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google; Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet; and Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google’s enterprise efforts, were all on hand at Google’s cloud conference in San Francisco to tell the world that their company is ready to serve businesses of all sizes. Even the big ones.

Any impression that Google Cloud Platform isn’t targeting big businesses, will change quickly, Greene told Fortune in an interview. “I never would have joined Google full-time if it wasn’t serious. That’s what I’m here for, it’s what excites me.

Greene was co-founder and chief executive of VMware, the pioneering server virtualization company. VMware virtualization runs in an estimated 80% of all big company data centers, so Greene knows something about enterprise customers. She has been a director at Google for four years and was named senior vice president in November.

Coming into this event, which was seen as Google’s full-court press to prove its cloud is ready for prime time, the company claimed new cloud customers including Home Depotand Disney’s consumer products division . It also re-announced that Coca-Cola, an AmazonWeb Services and MicrosoftAzure account, is also using Google Cloud.

Companies like Coca-Cola are turning to public cloud—massive collections of computer servers, storage and networking—that they rent from a provider like Google. By doing so they don’t have to build more internal data center capacity.

Still missing from Google’s dance card is a list of big new financial, insurance, and other institutional users. Nor was there any sign from big software players like SAP SAP -0.09% or Oracle ORCL -1.52% that their apps are certified to run on Google cloud. That sort of applications support is still needed for the biggest companies that run those applications in-house.

Greene acknowledged that getting those kinds of partners aboard is a huge priority.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a lack of impressive technology on display. Google demonstrated a new artificial intelligence artificial intelligence (aka machine learning) product that it’s making available to folks outside of Google. Third-party developers can now use the new technology Google itself used to build its own speech recognition and other applications. With machine learning the application itself adjusts or “learns” without help by human developers.

Also demonstrated was a tool called Kubernetes that can help companies deploy applications on their own computer servers or on Google’s cloud. Being able to divvy up applications between a company’s own data center and a third-party cloud is the hybrid model that most companies aspire to use because it lets them retain control of some data and applications while putting others into a public cloud like Google Cloud Platform.

Also boosting Google’s hybrid cloud portfolio is Stackdriver, which monitors, logs and diagnoses performance issues on AWS servers, Google cloud servers, and on a private cloud.

Urs H?lzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, talked up load balancing technology that he said will distribute computing workloads across regions. That technology, which he said AWS and Azure does not offer, is important both for startups in the consumer space that must serve many geographies as well as large multinational companies that need to address local performance issues.

But technology has never been Google’s problem. Its Achilles heel is that, to date, it doesn’t seem to know how to sell this stuff to big businesses where executives, not developers, make the buying decision.

Cloud consultant MSV Janakiram spelled it out after Google’s demonstrations on Wednesday: “Google needs to paint a picture, tell a story. No one in that room could understand the Kubernetes demo—it was too geeky.”

It may help that Google is ramping up consulting staff to help partners and customers learn how to use Google cloud services. This will not become a big IBM-style professional services business, however. . “It’s mostly a mechanism for customer feedback and enabling partners. We are not planning to make money with professional services, although we don’t want to lose money on them,” Greene noted.

Greene would not specify how many people have been hired for this services push.

To be fair we’re still fairly early on here. Maybe 5% or 8% of all information technology has been deployed to cloud thus far, and Google is on its way so there is still plenty of time even though AWS has now been around for 10 years.

There is a ton of potential business for several cloud players, although most analysts see the market as narrowing to a big three of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google on the public cloud side. And, given Google’s massive resources, it has an “endless runway” to grow its own business, and perhaps challenge its more established rivals, according to Gartner IT -0.64% analyst Douglas Toombs.