Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has claimed Google Cloud Platform (GCP) "has great momentum", despite continuing to not break out revenues for its enterprise technology business.
The firm released its quarterly results yesterday, bringing in $33 billion of revenue despite the EU's $5 billion penalty over its Android antitrust case.
While $28 billion of that comprised advertising earnings, Google's 'other revenues' category brought in $4.4 billion, up from $3.2 billion a year ago. GCP is folded into this category, rather than being broken out separately.
This makes it hard to see how much GCP contributed to Google's earnings, but Pichai has previously claimed it's a $1 billion-per-quarter business, and was positive on both GCP's momentum and future growth on a call with analysts yesterday.
"Our cloud business has great momentum. It's a natural extension of our long time strength in computing, data centers and machine learning," he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
He pointed to Google's vertical strategy paying off in winning customers like Domino's Pizza, PwC and others including Target, which is migrating three business divisions to the platform.
"Financial institutions are increasingly turning to the cloud to modernize their systems, explore new business models and improve customer experiences," Pichai added.
He also suggested Google could offer cloud services to advertising partners or customers of its shopping services, such as e-commerce firm Carrefour, and pointed to G Suite, which received a recent overhaul, as building momentum among enterprise customers.
"We are building upon these relationships, trying to have more holistic conversations across the breadth of our offerings, and I think I see all being very synergistic," he said.
GCP plays in a competitive market, and is considered the smallest of the big three public cloud providers, with both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cited as being ahead of GCP, but Pichai is confident of his cloud's continued growth in the enterprise.
"We are investing for the long run. We are definitely seeing traction. A lot of our effort, from a product and technology standpoint, we are definitely there and differentiated," he said.
"It's been a lot about investing in our go-to-market efforts. And as we do it, both developing our in-house strength but as well as partnering, those things are beginning to pay dividends."
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