Thomas Kurian, executive director of cloud services at Google LLC, speaks at the Google Cloud Next ’19 event in San Francisco, California, USA, on Tuesday, April 9, 2019. The conference brings together industry experts to discuss the future of cloud computing .
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google maintains software, Cloudtop, that employees use to access internal software. It is the kind of work that could be useful for companies that want to keep their employees productive while working from home while sheltering in place to avoid the further spread of coronavirus.
However, when Google cloud customers request a virtual desktop solution, Google instead sends them to third-party solutions, according to two people familiar with the company’s cloud business, who requested anonymity while discussing internal business issues.
Google’s approach contrasts sharply with market leaders Amazon and Microsoft. Both have their own virtual desktop services and both have seen an increase in use during the pandemic. For many companies that are navigating large-scale remote for the first time, relying on cloud providers to cope with the infrastructure is easier than keeping administrators on-site to manage servers – or sending computers to new employees.
For example, after Zoom saw an increase in new customers during the pandemic, the video calling software company signed up for more than 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops for its help desk employees, Amazon said in November. In May, AWS said oil and gas pipeline operator TC Energy signed up for Amazon WorkSpaces so employees could work safely from home.
For Microsoft, the boom was significant enough that CEO Satya Nadella mentioned it in the company’s quarterly call with analysts in April last year. “Windows virtual desktop usage tripled this quarter as organizations deploy virtual desktops and applications on Azure to enable remote secure work,” said Nadella.
There are no plans to make Cloudtop available to customers
Google first made its Cloudtop service available to employees in 2017. It is meant to help them build software, interact with internal systems and communicate via relay chat over the Internet or IRC. The service provides desktops running Linux and Windows operating systems, which can be useful for testing source code.
In previous years, Google has impressed the information technology industry by providing the software it relies on for its core business on the Internet, so that outside users can use it. He launched the Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Spanner databases after describing the basic software architecture in academic papers, for example.
Google released a paper on its virtual desktop software in 2018. Over 25% of Google employees use virtual desktops, and Google migrated the software to its public cloud in its corporate infrastructure to improve the user experience and reduce the total cost of ownership, according to the paper.
But that didn’t translate into a product for outsiders.
A Google spokesman said the company recognizes the growing demand for virtual desktops because people work remotely, but currently do not intend to offer Cloudtop as a cloud service. Instead, the company prioritizes third-party offerings in the virtual desktop market – Telus uses a product from Itopia in the private cloud on the Google cloud, while Equifax relies on Citrix software on the Google cloud, e.g. Other customers use a product from Private Workspot.
Promoting products from partners gives customers the opportunity to expand the technologies they use in their data centers into the public cloud, and customers will not be stuck on a proprietary service, the spokesman said.
These products have gained momentum since the onset of coronavirus. In 2020, revenue growth in the Citrix Workspace segment, which includes virtual desktop software, accelerated to about 13% year-over-year, up from 5% the previous year. It’s also profitable revenue: Citrix reported a gross margin of nearly 85%, up from 97% of S&P 500 companies, according to FactSet.
This increase benefits Google to some extent: the company gets a 20% reduction in the fees that third parties charge customers.
But neither of the third-party options is an impressive success, according to the two people familiar with the company’s cloud business.
“It was a little surprising that Google was no longer present in that market,” said Michael Silver, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner, which covered the category. – I don’t know why it wasn’t.
CLOCK: Thomas Kurian from Google Cloud about the future of cloud computing