Google's still got a long way to go to catch up with Amazon Web Services, which brings in more than $8 billion quarterly.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

July 26, 2019

2 Min Read
Google's Cloud Business Hits $8B Annually

Google Cloud is generating $8 billion revenue per year and plans to triple its sales force, executives said on the Alphabet quarterly earnings call on Thursday. Amazon, meanwhile, the cloud computing leader, saw its cloud revenue growth slowing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Thursday's second-quarter earnings call that Google cloud is a key growth driver for parent company Alphabet, CNBC reported. Its run rate is up from $4 billion the company reported in early 2018, TechCrunch said. Current Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian took over the business seven months ago.

Google has a long way to go to catch up with its top competitor – AWS reported 37% in growth Thursday, to $8.38 billion quarterly, which makes it about four times the size of Google's cloud business.

This was the first time AWS growth fell below 40% since Amazon started breaking out AWS numbers in 2015, according to VentureBeat. Nonetheless, AWS still accounts for about 13% of Amazon's total revenue. Overall, Amazon reported $2.6 billion profit for the June quarter, up slightly from the year prior, but well below its $3.6 billion record-setting first quarter, and ending Amazon's streak of four consecutive quarters of record profits, CNN said.

Microsoft, the number two player in the cloud, said last week that Azure grew 64%.

Why this matters
Telcos are increasingly looking to move workloads from on-premises to the cloud, for non-network applications at least. For example, AT&T just this month announced big cloud deals with Microsoft and IBM. And AT&T will also partner with those two cloud platforms to develop new 5G and edge applications. As these partnerships are strategic, carriers have a keen interest in the cloud providers scale and overall financial health.

— Mitch Wagner Visit my LinkedIn profileFollow me on TwitterJoin my Facebook GroupRead my blog: Things Mitch Wagner Saw Executive Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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