Google Cloud is gaining traction with enterprises, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, growing substantially in the first quarter of 2018 a year after it started earning $1 billion in revenue each quarter.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, doesn't reveal specific revenue figures for Google's cloud, instead lumping them together in its "other revenues" column with Google Play and hardware products, but the giant's revenue figures released earlier this week revealed that Google Cloud helped that division earn $4.35 billion for Q1 2018, up from $3.2 billion a year ago.
Meanwhile, Pichai gave a little more away in an earnings call earlier this week, saying the division's growth was helped by Google Cloud's recent success with enterprises.
"We are growing across the board and are also signing significantly larger, more strategic deals for cloud," he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. "Our security capabilities, the easy-to-use advanced data analytics and machine learning solutions and the secure and industry-leading collaboration platform, G Suite, are winning customers over. Google Cloud is growing well."
"We believe our secure environment is an important factor in driving enterprise customer wins," he added. "G Suite customers like Colgate-Palmolive company tell us that no one offers a better combination of hardware, network and data security."
He referenced Cloud AutoML as one of Google's headline launches, saying it's making it easier for businesses without machine learning resource to build complex neural nets.
Over the last year, Google has also invested heavily in infrastructure, ensuring it can keep up with the likes of AWS and Microsoft.
"Our global infrastructure continues to expand to support demand," Pichai added. "We commissioned three new subsea cables and announced new regions in Canada, Japan, Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, bringing our total of recently launched and upcoming regions to 20."
