Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze the shifting balance of power between Google Cloud and AWS.
Highlights
00:03 — Last week, we had three of the four hyperscalers report their Q1 numbers. It’s been fascinating to look at those. While everybody did very, very well, Google Cloud just had an utterly exceptional, spectacular Q1, and I think the evidence of what we see in these comparative numbers shows why Google Cloud has risen to number one.
00:51 — If we compare side by side, Google Cloud and AWS in Q1 on the growth rate, their revenue, their backlog growth, and the backlog numbers — the growth: 63% to 28%. Now we will certainly hear from a lot of the AWS fanboys that that’s just because there’s a discrepancy in size. That’s true, but it does not cover this discrepancy in growth rate.
Community Summit North America is the largest independent innovation, education, and training event for Microsoft business applications delivered by Expert Users, Microsoft Leaders, MVPs, and Partners. Register now to attend Community Summit in Nashville, TN from October 11-15.
01:35 — For Google Cloud, the backlog grew 93% to $462 billion. For AWS, the backlog grew 49% to $364 billion. Really impressive numbers here from AWS, but they play in a market with some other pretty good companies as well. Google Cloud shows 93% backlog growth versus 49%, and $100 billion bigger in backlog total versus AWS.
02:31 — AWS in Q1 had 85% more revenue than Google Cloud. Then how do you explain this backlog discrepancy? It shows that going forward, which is what the backlog shows us, future trends of business, Google Cloud is winning much more business in the future. Google Cloud is winning more new business, and that’s where the game is being played.
03:25 — So clearly, the whole AI boom had a huge impact on these numbers. We saw Microsoft, just to toss this in, Microsoft’s growth rate was 29% in Q1, its fiscal Q3, and its RPO, which is its version of backlog, was up, it said, 99% to$ 627 billion. Oracle, its RPO was up 325% to over $550 billion. So, it’s just an incredible market here right now.
04:05 — For a long time, AWS has conditioned the market to say AWS is the king of the cloud and it will be forever. That’s just not true anymore. Google Cloud, through innovation and jumping into the AI game early and aggressively, is booming right now, and its core cloud business is doing very well.
