Google Management: We Have The Money, Means And Commitment To Reach Our Cloud Ambitions

The first day of Alphabet Inc GOOGL’s Google Cloud Next 2017 Conference in San Francisco didn’t have any new product announcements, but Google said it has the “money, means and commitment” to support its cloud ambitions.

Google may announce new products on Day 2 of the event, which is held between March 8 and 10.

Day 1 Highlights

On Day One, the company flagged GCP (Google Cloud Platform) more as a home for “lift and shift” legacy workloads and focused more on site/workload reliability. The company made a clear dig at AWS (Amazon Web Services) which suffered from a high-profile outage last week.

Google, which has invested $30 billion on its cloud platform, highlighted uptime, ease of scaling as its prime infrastructure advantages. 

“Mgmt touts “Lift and Shift” customer momentum, but reference customers suggest more modest ambitions,” Wells Fargo analyst Peter Stabler wrote in a note.

Stabler pointed out that reference customer HSBC Holdings plc (ADR) HSBC though appeared more aggressively committed to a “cloud first” stance, but looks to pursue a hybrid model for the foreseeable future.

Machine Learning - A Key Differentiator

Further, Google continued to highlight Machine Learning as its core differentiator of its Cloud platform. Google also announced the acquisition of Kaggle, an online data science and ML community.

Meanwhile, Stabler has an Outperform rating on Alphabet shares on the company’s solid search business and strong prospects to capitalize on the evolution of mobile computing and content consumption.

“We also see opportunity for Alphabet to play an important role in secular growth opportunities in enterprise cloud computing, artificial intelligence and automated tech,” Stabler added.

Stabler has a valuation range of $975 to $1,000.

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