Google Cloud doesn’t need an enterprise sales team: Box, Marketo, Pivotal, VMware are on the job

Few, if any, doubt that Google owns the technologies that companies want, but the question has been whether Google is serious about the enterprise.

After all, its business and productivity products like G Suite — Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Sites, Admin, Vault, Google+Google Cloud — as well as its machine learning, NLP, and AI rate among the world’s best.

Moreover, Google is where big data crunching, modern analytics, and data science found their roots. What Google has lacked, until recently, is a solid and consistent strategy to win enterprises over.

That changed with the hire of Diane Greene, the cofounder and CEO of VMware. At VMware, she walked what was once an unknown startup into the world’s biggest companies and taught them that virtualization was a smarter way.

Since taking the reigns of Google’s Cloud business less than two years ago, Greene has not only brought in some world class hires, but also established partnerships with important, well-known enterprise players such as Box, Marketo, VMware and Pivotal.

Google + Pivotal + VMware

Yesterday at VMworld, VMware’s annual user conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, Google, Pivotal and VMware announced a partnership around containers, and more specifically, Kubernetes. Kubernetes, an open source technology developed at Google, is a managed environment for deploying containerized applications. Software developers like Kubernetes because it allows them to build, iterate, and deploy applications faster and at scale.

In other words, it takes the repetitive, non-value adding tasks way from developers and frees them to write code. Not only that, but enterprises don’t have to spend time and money doing something that a machine can do.

Meet PKS

Pivotal provides a commercialized version of Cloud Foundry, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) on which applications can be run. VMware provides a management layer for deploying and managing containers.

Marry these (Google, Pivotal, and VMware) products and you get something that the three vendors have agreed to call PKS or Pivotal Container Service.

The promise is that PKS will make it simple for companies to roll out Kubernetes and for developers to build applications that can be easily installed on servers running VMware or that run in Google’s cloud.
For the non-geeks among us, here’s the deal: with PKS, application developers can build the same solutions whether they run in the data center via VMware or in the cloud via Google.

Who wins?

Since most large enterprises aren’t all-in on the cloud yet, this represents a big win for Google because PKS presents a paved highway from on-premise to Google Cloud Platform. But developers and enterprises aren’t the only winners. This arrangement positions Google Cloud Platform alongside VMware when it approaches enterprise customers (VMware doesn’t have its own cloud platform to sell.) It also puts Pivotal, which is still startup, on a playing field with giants like Google and VMware. And it gives VMware access to Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Put this together with two enterprise-related collaboration/partnership announcements that Google has made in the past week, and here’s what we have:

• Box boasting about its deal with Google
• Marketo talking about how it will marry sales and marketing via its Google partnership
• VMware and Pivotal celebrating their Google Cloud play

By the end of this year CTOs and Chief Data Officers (CDOs) may be talking as much about Google’s Cloud Platform as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft Azure.