Connect with us

International Circuit

Google cloud Q1 revenue jumps 52%, unscathed by COVID-19

Google Cloud revenues hit $2.78 billion during the first quarter of 2020, growing 52% compared to last year.

It’s a big increase for the No. 3 cloud provider, and it comes as Google faces an uphill battle to unseat the top two — Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure — which will report their quarterly earnings later this week. And, it’s also worth noting that this is only the second quarter that parent company Alphabet reported Google Cloud revenue as a separate line item.

Google Cloud, along with search and YouTube, boosted Alphabet’s overall Q1 revenues to $41.16 billion for the first quarter up 13% year over year. And despite his warning earlier this month that the company would “significantly slow down the pace of hiring” for the rest of the year and reduce spending on data centers, machines, and non-essential marketing and travel, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai sounded upbeat on today’s earnings call.

While the global pandemic hit Google’s advertising revenue hard — both Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat said after a successful January and February, ad revenues saw a steep decline in March, which correlated to the COVID-19-related stay-at-home mandates — it may have boosted sales in some other areas including Google Cloud and G-Suite during Q1.

Business Impact ‘Significant and Lasting’

“Many businesses are speaking to us, looking to reinvent their operations,” Pichai said on the earnings call. “The most pressing concern for small and large businesses right now is business continuity, solving for issues like employee safety, dramatic surges in demand, supply chain, and managing a remote workforce. Ultimately, we’ll see a long-term acceleration of movement from businesses to digital services, including increased online work, education, medicine, shopping, and entertainment. It will be significant and lasting.”

To this end, Google Cloud has been working with health care providers, researchers, governments, and communities to help combat the virus. “Our community mobility reports help authorities see in aggregate how social distancing requirements are working,” Pichai said.

“Google Cloud is forming deep partnerships, such as with leading healthcare provider, HCA Healthcare, to understand data around ICU bed availability, ventilator supplies, and test results,” he continued, also noting the contract-tracing partnership with Apple.

Pichai name dropped other Google Cloud Platform customers including the state of New York, which is running its new unemployment application system on Google Cloud’s infrastructure. Additionally, major Canadian supermarket Loblaw and e-commerce company Wayfair both used Google Cloud to successfully scale “a significant increase in demand,” he added.

“We are helping communication companies adapt to new behavior patterns,” Pichai said. “Vodafone is using Google Cloud platform to help it analyze network traffic flows to keep everyone connected.”

Millions Using Google Cloud Services

And as remote working and learning has become the new normal, millions of users are turning to Google’s cloud services to facilitate online meetings and classrooms. “A hundred million students and educators are using Google Classroom — double the number from the beginning of March,” Pichai said.

He added that last week Meet, Google’s video conferencing platform that competes against Zoom, Cisco Webex, and Microsoft Teams “surpassed a significant milestone. We are now adding roughly 3 million new users each day and have seen a 30-fold increase in usage since January. There are now over 100 million daily meet meeting prospects.”

Additionally, Google’s G-Suite cloud services now have more than 6 million paying customers, Pichai said.

However, this doesn’t mean that Google remains immune to the effects of COVID-19. Porat wouldn’t provide second-quarter guidance even when pressed by investors. All she said is that is will be “a difficult one.”

―SDX Central

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Copyright © 2024 Communications Today

error: Content is protected !!