Google's Diane Greene is on the verge of scoring a huge I-told-you-so
But the folks inside Google aren't listening to the naysayers, particularly Google's cloud chief, Diane Greene. Over the last year, she has revamped the company's cloud organization so that it gets invited to the table when corporations choose a cloud provider.
And to make sure Google has the stuff to win the deals.
She could soon be chalking up a giant win: PayPal is considering going with Google's cloud instead of rival bidders Amazon and Microsoft, sources told CNBC's Ari Levy.
Sources warned that the deal isn't final and none of the companies would comment on it. Still, given PayPal's underlying technology, it seems appropriate that Google would be top on the list of potential winners. And if Google wins, it could be a harbinger of many more such wins to come.
The OpenStack payoff
That's because, as Business Insider originally reported, a few years ago PayPal quietly made the unusual decision to go with a technology called OpenStack in its data centers. OpenStack now runs its 8,500 servers and another 180,000 pieces of data center assets (computer storage, network equipment and the like), InformationWeek reported last year.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system. An enterprise can install its own data center and then can choose among many OpenStack cloud services, moving apps and data between them all, never being locked into to a single cloud provider. It was created to be the anti-Amazon Web Services.
Google joined the OpenStack Foundation in 2015, and has been working on bringing one of its hit cloud technologies to OpenStack, an open source container manager named Kubernetes.
In other words, Google is closely aligned with OpenStack in a way that neither Amazon, nor Microsoft, is.
And for a company that just placed most of its eggs in the OpenStack basket, like PayPal, that would make Google an attractive cloud partner, even if Google doesn't yet offer the breadth of services that Amazon offers.
Then, once Google can claim PayPal as a marquee customer, other OpenStack users will start inviting Google to bid for their contacts as well.
And there are a lot of OpenStack customers. The 451 Group says OpenStack generated $1.2 billion in revenues in 2015 for various vendors, reports eWeek.
All of this means that Google's grand strategy to become a giant cloud player could be working as planned.
- I quit McKinsey after 1.5 years. I was making over $200k but my mental health was shattered.
- Some Tesla factory workers realized they were laid off when security scanned their badges and sent them back on shuttles, sources say
- I tutor the children of some of Dubai's richest people. One of them paid me $3,000 to do his homework.
- Move over Bollywood, audio shows are starting to enter the coveted ‘100 Crores Club’
- 10 Powerful foods for lowering bad cholesterol
- Eat Well, live well: 10 Potassium-rich foods to maintain healthy blood pressure
- Bitcoin scam case: ED attaches assets worth over Rs 97 cr of Raj Kundra, Shilpa Shetty
- IREDA's GIFT City branch to give special foreign currency loans for green projects