Alphabet Inc (GOOGL):Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference -Key Takeaways

Products: Google has invested over $29bn in capex over the last three years todifferentiate and secure their cloud offering. Key differentiators include: BigQuery,pre-trained machine learnings models (cloud translate, cloud vision, cloud naturallanguage, cloud speech) and customer machine learning (CloudML). Ms. Greenebelieves ‘data’ (data management, data analytics), which is in Google’s DNA, is itsbiggest source of differentiation.

Go-to-market: Alphabet has re-focused its go-to-market strategy to present amore unified front, aided by recent investments in various support functions(senior office of the CTO, customer services, etc). These changes have helpedconvince customers that Alphabet is serious about the Cloud and is committed tohelping customers drive digital transformations. The company has also focusedon different verticals, including Retail, Health, Media, FinTech and IoT.

Partnerships: In meetings, CIOs are realizing that they need to be digitalized, andare looking for help to make that transition and estimate the cost impact –making the partnership model very important for Alphabet. The company hasmade several investments in partner training, including its acquisition ofQwikLabs, the company that did online training for AWS.

Recent trends: Starting about four months ago, Alphabet started seeing more“lift and shift“ type requests from customers. Ms. Greene believes the world iswaking up to the fact the cloud is more secure, but still believes that we are stillin the very early days of adoption.

Outlook: When asked about the one year outlook for Google’s cloud business,Ms. Greene said she expects to have a number of large grade customers andpartners talking about GCP and believes the market will better understand whyGoogle can succeed in the enterprise cloud world.