Google: 'old school' players accepting the cloud

Cloud computing has made its mark now the older, powerful players are getting on board.

This was the belief of Dave Girouard, president of enterprise at Google.

As part of a speech at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, Girouard was positive over cloud computing's growth in the past year and thinks now is its time.

"2009 was an exceptional year for cloud computing and Google as well," he said, "and a great signal is that the old school has jumped on board. Companies like IBM and Microsoft are now jumping on with cloud computing and that is how we know we have arrived."

More than 60 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies have "gone Google" and the firm continues to see growth in the enterprise sector.

Girouard said: "In terms of adoption we have had huge moments... we now have 20 million businesses and schools using Google apps."

"The biggest thing that has changed since a year ago is big company adoption. We have moved forward a lot, now with dozens of companies with tens of thousands of employees [having] moved to Google."

He admitted that cloud computing was not perfect yet but praised the momentum as well as giving a nod of appreciation to Salesforce.

He concluded: "From the Google perspective the work that Salesforce has done in the past decade has paved the road for us."