Google Alert: 'Epic' Battle Seen Brewing In The Cloud

• Shares of Alphabet Inc GOOG are up 40 percent year-to-date, and had been trading around the $500 mark from January to June.
• Deutsche Bank’s Ross Sandler maintained a Buy rating on the company, with a price target of $900.
• Google’s recent announcements indicate aggressiveness in implementing its cloud strategy and posing tough competition to existing players, Sandler stated.

Google, now restructured as Alphabet Inc, recently made several announcements related to its cloud strategy, including the acquisition of cloud start-up bebop and placing Diane Greene at the helm of its overall Enterprise Cloud team. The company also outlined that its goal was to take its cloud revenues far ahead of its ads revenue by 2020.

Analyst Ross Sandler noted these aggressive moves by Google towards enterprise cloud, combined with its massive infrastructure, indicate a tough war in the cloud scene. He added that the Google Cloud platform had gained decent traction among several developers like Snapchat, but the efforts to penetrate enterprise are still nascent.

Greene and her team at Google Cloud have a lot of experience in product integration, engineering, marketing and sales in a new cloud organization, including the bebop team. The Deutsche Bank report added that the company is benefiting already with its sites and apps running on its own cloud infrastructure.

Sandler believes that even if Google contributes only a part of the growth in the cloud segment, it would result in boosting the company’s market capitalization.