Google already runs much of the
digital lives of consumers through e-mail, Internet searches and YouTube
videos. Now it wants the corporations, too.
The
search giant has for years been evasive about its plans for a so-called public
cloud of computers and data storage that is rented to individuals and
businesses. On Tuesday, however, it will announce pricing, features and
performance guarantees aimed at companies ranging from startups to
multinationals.
It is the latest salvo in an
escalating battle among some of the most influential companies in technology to
control corporate and government computing through public clouds. That battle,
which is expected to last years and cost the competitors billions of dollars
annually in material and talent, already includes Microsoft, IBM and Amazon.
As
businesses move from owning their own computers to renting data-crunching power
and software over the Internet, this resource-rich foursome is making big
promises about computing clouds. Supercomputing-based research, for example,
won’t be limited to organizations that can afford supercomputers. And tech
companies with a hot idea will be able to get big fast because they won’t have
to build their own computer networks.
Take
Snapchat, the photo-swapping service that recently turned down a
multibillion-dollar takeover offer from Facebook. It processes 4,000 pictures a
second on Google’s servers but is just two years old and has fewer than 30
employees. The company started out working with a Google service that helps
young companies create applications and was chosen by Google to be an early
customer of its cloud.
Working
with Google has allowed Snapchat to avoid spending a lot to support its users.
“I’ve never owned a computer
server,” said Bobby Murphy, a co-founder and the chief technical officer of
Snapchat.
That is
a big shift from the days when, for young companies, knowing how to build a
complex data centre was just as important as creating a popular service.
“These
things are incredibly fast – setting up new servers in a minute, when it used
to take several weeks to order, install and test,” said Chris Gaun, an analyst
with Gartner. “Finance, product research, crunching supercomputing data like
genomic information can all happen faster.”
Amazon’s
cloud, called Amazon Web Services, was arguably the pioneer of the public cloud
and for now is the largest player. Amazon says its cloud has “hundreds of
thousands” of customers. Although most of these are individuals and small
businesses, it also counts big names like Netflix, which stopped building its
own data centres in 2008 and was completely on Amazon’s cloud by 2012. All of
Amazon’s services are run inside that cloud, too.
A more
traditional consumer goods company, 3M, uses Microsoft’s public cloud, called
Azure, to process images for 20,000 individuals and companies in 50 countries
to analyze various product designs. Microsoft says Azure handles 100 petabytes
of data a day, roughly 700 years of HD movies.
“People
started out building things on Amazon’s service, but now there are a few big
players,” said Murphy. “Hopefully the time between an idea and its
implementation can get even quicker.”
Google
is cutting prices for most of its services like online data storage and
computer processing by 10 per cent and its high-end data storage prices by 60
per cent, while offering access to larger and more complex computing systems.
Google is also guaranteeing that critical projects will remain working 99.95
per cent of the time, far better performance than in most corporate data
centres.
“People
make a mistake thinking this is just a version of the computers on their desks,
at a lower cost,” said Greg DeMichillie, director of Google’s public cloud
platform. “This is lots of distributed computing intelligence, not just in
computers and phones, but in cars, in thermometers, everywhere. The demand will
only increase.”
DeMichillie,
who came to Google from Amazon Web Services, allowed that Google was far slower
than Amazon to get into the business.
“I give
them a lot of credit,” he said of Amazon, adding that in the long run he
believes Google’s deep experience in data centres will help the company provide
a stronger and more reliable service.
Google
has a mixed record in similar efforts. The business version of Drive, its word
processing, spreadsheet and storage service, was introduced under another name
in 2007. It now has revenue of more than $1-billion a year, but current and
former executives have complained that it is a low priority inside the company
because Google makes so much more money from consumer advertising.
But
Google is one of the few companies that has the heft to compete with the
others.
Over
the past several years, each of the big cloud providers has built a global
network of more than a million computer servers. In the process, the companies
are rethinking almost every step to maximize efficiency and power. Intel, the
world’s largest semiconductor maker, has six salespeople assigned full time to
Amazon, feeding a continuous appetite for new computers.
Only a
few other companies, mostly in China, are likely to manage either the capital
or the expertise to build such systems, analysts say. Facebook, which does have
a giant global computing network, so far has not shown interest in corporate
computing.
IBM,
which in July paid $2-billion to buy another cloud provider, will add 12 new
facilities in 2014, eventually with 240,000 more servers around the globe,
according to a senior IBM executive. It already has 25 such facilities.
Hundreds of cloud-based services will be introduced, including cheap new
communications systems and software for big, complex companies.
David
Campbell, the chief technical officer of Microsoft’s cloud group, said he was
often surprised by the growth of the clouds.
“It’s
vastly different from anything anyone has done, a completely different beast,”
he said.
And
this shift is just beginning, maybe three years into a 10-year process that is
democratizing heavy-duty processing power, Campbell said.
“Wal-Mart
did amazing things by running computers on its supply chain and analyzing
customer demand,” said Campbell. “Now you can imagine some guy in a cabin in
the Rocky Mountains producing that kind of thing for 500 or 1,000 retailers.”
The
biggest promise of these clouds is their ability to make it easy to do things
that would have cost millions of dollars in hardware just a few years ago.
That
is, unless you want to build your own public cloud. Executives at all four
public cloud competitors say there is no college course or professional
training for running computers at this scale: The only real way to learn how to
do it is by working at the handful of companies with the resources to pull it
off.
“We’re
giving people the same services we rely on to run Google,” said DeMichillie. “I
wouldn’t say spending billions of dollars doesn’t matter, but there is a
learning by doing in this, too; hard information problems we’ve tackled.”
Source: theglobeandmail
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