Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, yesterday revealed its second quarter earnings report which displayed encouraging signs for Google’s cloud computing ambitions. According to the report, the company’s considerable attempts at making its Google Cloud platform enterprise ready appear to have yielded better-than-expected financial results in Q2 2017.
The Q2 report shows that Google’s overall revenue for the fiscal quarter ended June 30 stood at USD 26.01 billion, with profits earned during the same period totaling USD 3.5 billion. That makes for a 21% improvement over Google’s financial performance during the identical quarter last year, when overall revenue had amounted to USD 21.5 billion. As for Google’s cloud business, the revenue it generates falls under Google’s ‘Other Revenue’ category, which accounted for USD 3 billion of the grand total. This translates into a 42% increase over similar gains in Q2 2016.
While announcing the report, CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was pleased with his company’s cloud accomplishments:
Google Cloud continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors.
In Q2 the number of new deals we closed worth more than USD 500,000 is three times what it was last year.
We (have) also opened new Google Cloud regions in Northern Virginia, Singapore, Sydney and London.
Likewise, CFO of Google, Ruth Porat, also acknowledged the financial potential of Google’s cloud business:
It’s obviously not a financial forecast but it does display the traction we are having with cloud solutions in the market and Google Cloud remains one of the fastest growing businesses across Alphabet.
However, in spite of Google Cloud’s noticeable rise in prominence, Amazon’s AWS remains the dominant force in the cloud computing business with a reported market share of approximately 33% as of June 30, 2017.