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

在舊金山的谷歌云平臺(tái)全球用戶大會(huì)上，谷歌首席執(zhí)行官桑德爾?皮查伊、谷歌母公司Alphabet董事長(zhǎng)埃里克?施密特以及谷歌負(fù)責(zé)企業(yè)業(yè)務(wù)的高級(jí)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(jīng)準(zhǔn)備好為各種公司提供服務(wù)，甚至包括那些大企業(yè)。

格林在接受《財(cái)富》雜志采訪時(shí)表示，如果有人印象里谷歌云平臺(tái)還沒瞄向大公司，這種看法很快就會(huì)改變，“如果不是認(rèn)真的，我根本就不會(huì)加入谷歌。我來這兒就是為了云平臺(tái)，讓我激動(dòng)的就是這個(gè)?！?/p>

格林曾是VMware的聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人和首席執(zhí)行官。這家公司是虛擬服務(wù)器領(lǐng)域的開拓者。據(jù)估算，80%的大公司數(shù)據(jù)中心都在使用VMware的虛擬化解決方案。因此，格林對(duì)企業(yè)客戶有一定的了解。她在谷歌擔(dān)任了四年的董事，去年11月被任命為高級(jí)副總裁。

本次大會(huì)被視為谷歌的全員亮相新聞發(fā)布會(huì)，意圖證明該公司的云服務(wù)已經(jīng)為“黃金檔”做好了準(zhǔn)備。谷歌披露的云服務(wù)新增客戶包括家得寶和迪士尼的消費(fèi)品部門。谷歌還再次宣布，一直使用AWS和Microsoft Azure服務(wù)的可口可樂已經(jīng)開始使用谷歌云平臺(tái)。

可口可樂等公司正在轉(zhuǎn)向公共云服務(wù)，也就是從類似谷歌的供應(yīng)商手里租用大量服務(wù)器、存儲(chǔ)空間和網(wǎng)絡(luò)設(shè)備，這樣就不必?cái)U(kuò)充內(nèi)部數(shù)據(jù)中心的容量。

不過谷歌云平臺(tái)的親密關(guān)系網(wǎng)里還缺一些大型的新金融公司、保險(xiǎn)公司以及其他機(jī)構(gòu)用戶。SAP和甲骨文等大型軟件公司的應(yīng)用有沒有獲得在谷歌云平臺(tái)上運(yùn)行的授權(quán)，也還不清楚。畢竟使用這些應(yīng)用的大企業(yè)需要在云平臺(tái)上獲得相應(yīng)的支持。

格林承認(rèn)，跟大公司建立合作關(guān)系是谷歌下一步工作的重中之重。

不過，大公司的暫時(shí)缺席并不代表會(huì)上展示的技術(shù)缺乏亮點(diǎn)。谷歌展示了供外部人員使用的新人工智能（即機(jī)器學(xué)習(xí)）產(chǎn)品?，F(xiàn)在，第三方開發(fā)商可以像谷歌一樣利用新技術(shù)打造自己的應(yīng)用，比如語音識(shí)別軟件。在機(jī)器學(xué)習(xí)技術(shù)的幫助下，應(yīng)用可以自我調(diào)整或“學(xué)習(xí)”，而不需要開發(fā)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(yè)用戶把應(yīng)用部署在自己的服務(wù)器或者谷歌云上。大多數(shù)公司都想采用把應(yīng)用拆分的混合模式，一部分放在自己的數(shù)據(jù)中心里，一部分放在類似谷歌云平臺(tái)的公共云上，這樣可以保證對(duì)某些數(shù)據(jù)和應(yīng)用的控制。

谷歌推出的云產(chǎn)品中還包括Stackdriver，可以監(jiān)視、記錄并診斷AWS服務(wù)器、谷歌云服務(wù)器以及私有云上的性能問題。

負(fù)責(zé)技術(shù)基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施的高級(jí)副總裁烏爾斯?霍爾茨勒介紹了谷歌的均衡負(fù)載技術(shù)。他說，這項(xiàng)技術(shù)可以實(shí)現(xiàn)計(jì)算任務(wù)的跨地區(qū)分配?；魻柎睦罩赋?，AWS和Azure沒有類似功能，對(duì)要在多個(gè)地區(qū)提供服務(wù)的消費(fèi)領(lǐng)域初創(chuàng)企業(yè)以及需要解決本地性能問題的跨國(guó)公司來說，做到這一點(diǎn)都很重要。

技術(shù)對(duì)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(chǎn)品。在大企業(yè)，做采購(gòu)決策的不是開發(fā)人員，而是高管。

云行業(yè)顧問MSV?簡(jiǎn)納基蘭姆在周三的展示過后指出：“谷歌應(yīng)該畫幅藍(lán)圖，然后講講故事。在場(chǎng)的人都沒看懂對(duì)Kubernetes的演示，他們搞得太技術(shù)流了?！?/p>

谷歌正在擴(kuò)充咨詢團(tuán)隊(duì)，以幫助合作伙伴和顧客了解怎樣使用谷歌云服務(wù)，情況可能會(huì)有所改善。不過，這個(gè)團(tuán)隊(duì)不會(huì)發(fā)展成IBM式的專業(yè)服務(wù)部門……格林表示：“建立咨詢團(tuán)隊(duì)主要是為了獲得用戶反饋以及協(xié)助合作伙伴。雖然我們沒打算在咨詢業(yè)務(wù)上賺錢，但也不想虧錢。”

格林沒有透露咨詢團(tuán)隊(duì)已經(jīng)招了多少人。

公平地說，云服務(wù)領(lǐng)域的發(fā)展還相當(dāng)初級(jí)。目前大概只有5%或者8%的信息技術(shù)存在云端。如今谷歌已經(jīng)奮起直追。盡管AWS已經(jīng)發(fā)展了10年，但谷歌還有大把時(shí)間趕上。

對(duì)一些云服務(wù)商來說其實(shí)業(yè)務(wù)發(fā)展?jié)摿薮?，不過，大多數(shù)分析師都認(rèn)為公共云市場(chǎng)比較小眾，只屬于AWS、Azure和谷歌云平臺(tái)。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(yè)務(wù)有“無限長(zhǎng)”的起飛跑道，也有可能對(duì)更知名的競(jìng)爭(zhēng)對(duì)手形成挑戰(zhàn)。（財(cái)富中文網(wǎng)）

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 “l(fā)earns” 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.