​SAP deal will give Google more enterprise credibility: Gartner

Google is late to the enterprise cloud market – behind competitors Amazon and Microsoft – but its new relationship with German giant SAP will give the company more credibility with larger customers.

This is the view of Gartner VP research fellow, David Smith, who said the new agreement with SAP gives Google more an “enterprise credibility smell.”

SAP is now offering its business applications on Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP). The HANA database software is now running on the GCP and Google’s suite of web-based desktop apps are also being offered to users.

“SAP gets to be with the cool kids and Google gets to be associated with someone who has an enterprise presence and capabilities,” said Smith.

Colgate-Palmolive is one company that is using both SAP and Google’s wares. A long-term SAP shop, the company last year moved around 28,000 staff globally to G Suite in an implementation that took only six months.

Smith said Google has “all the technology in the world” but has only fairly recently, over the past three to four years, packaged it up as a cloud offering. Products like G Suite (formerly Google Apps) have been around for about 8 years, he said.

“Google has had some success but the thing that has been really holding it back has been that it has not really focused on large enterprises and that the dramatic change from just a year ago. It’s a completely different Google than it was two years ago,” said Smith.

Amazon created the infrastructure-as-a-service market more than 10 years ago and Microsoft, despite some initial speed bumps, retooled and is a very clear number two in the market, he said.

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