Google Named Top-Tier Software Vendor by APPS RUN THE WORLD in the APPS and CLOUD TOP 500 Market Report

Google Strengths, Domain Expertise, and Key Differentiators

Google provides Cloud AI, a comprehensive solution offering advanced machine learning services that include pre-trained models and a range of features. This neural network-based ML service demonstrates superior training performance and achieves higher accuracy compared to other deep learning systems. The services provided are not only fast and scalable but also incredibly user-friendly. Prominent Google applications, such as Photos (image search), Translate, Inbox (Smart Reply), and the Google app (voice search), leverage the power of Cloud machine learning. This platform is now accessible as a cloud service, delivering unmatched scale and speed to meet the demands of various business applications. Pricing for Google Workspace begins at just $6 per user per month for Business Starter, $12 per user per month for Business Standard, and $18 per user per month for Business Plus. Enterprise plans are also available to cater to specific needs.

Google Pay, on the other hand, is a cutting-edge digital wallet platform and online payment system developed by Google. It enables users to make secure in-app and tap-to-pay purchases using their Android phones, tablets, or watches. Beyond facilitating payments, this service also supports the storage and management of various digital passes, including coupons, boarding passes, student ID cards, event tickets, movie tickets, public transportation tickets, store cards, and loyalty cards. Google Pay boasts a vast network, with over 3,000 banks and financial institutions partnering with the platform to offer their services to users.

Google Recent Developments

December 6, 2023, Google unveiled Gemini, its latest and most powerful AI model, designed to be multimodal and flexible, seamlessly integrating text, code, audio, image, and video. Gemini Ultra, the largest model, has surpassed human performance on various language understanding benchmarks. Gemini Pro is currently integrated into Bard, an AI experiment, while Gemini Nano is optimized for on-device tasks.

Introduced on September 22, 2023, Duet AI is a Google-powered collaborator designed to enhance productivity on Google Cloud and in Google Workspace. Leveraging state-of-the-art generative-AI foundation models, Duet AI offers intelligent code assistance, facilitates chat interactions for improved communication, integrates with AppSheet for building intelligent business applications, and provides data classification capabilities in Google Sheets, streamlining tasks for users without requiring extensive coding.

Google introduced Bard, an experimental generative AI service powered by a lightweight LaMDA model, designed to enhance user creativity and productivity. Initially released on March 21, 2023, with a waitlist, Google later expanded access to over 200 countries and territories worldwide, following the removal of the waitlist on May 10.

Google has rebranded G Suite to Google Workspace in an effort to consolidate its workplace productivity tools and align its software suite with the new era of remote work and virtual collaboration. In the name of Google Workspace reinvention, Goole acqiured Playspace, a video, screenshare, & whiteboard collaboration tool. The tool will be incorporated within Google Workspace.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian planned to borrow some strategies from Oracle to help the search giant catch up to its peers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the cloud wars. Kurian said Google Cloud would work on serving specific markets, expand the sales force, and invest in technology that would allow it to serve customers on those other clouds too. Kurian spent over two decades at Oracle before joining Google early this year 2019.

Google Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Activities

On May 4, 2022, Google announced the acquisition of Raxium, a company specializing in single panel MicroLED display technologies. Based in Fremont, California, Raxium's expertise in creating compact, cost-effective, and energy-efficient high-resolution displays is expected to contribute to Google's hardware development initiatives, aiming to enhance the quality of devices and services for users globally.

September 12, 2022, Google Cloud, under the leadership of CEO Thomas Kurian, announced the completion of its acquisition of Mandiant, a prominent player in dynamic cyber defense, threat intelligence, and incident response services. The retained Mandiant brand will continue its mission to secure organizations from cyber threats, emphasizing a proactive approach to modernizing Security Operations workflows and technologies.

In February 2020, Google completed $2.6 billion Looker acquisition. Today, hundreds of joint customers already rely on Google Cloud and Looker to make smarter business decisions. And by joining together, Thomas Kurian believes Google Cloud will be uniquely positioned to address the data analytics and business intelligence demands of even more enterprises globally, across all industries. Looker will strengthen Google Cloud’s analytics and data warehouse capabilities, including BigQuery, enabling its customers to address some of their toughest business challenges, faster—all while maintaining complete control of their data.

In January 2020, Google acquired AppSheet, an eight-year-old no-code mobile-application-building platform. AppSheet complements Google Cloud’s strategy to reimagine the application development space with a platform that helps enterprises innovate with no-code development, workflow automation, application integration and API management as they modernize their business processes in the cloud. AppSheet’s ability to power a range of applications—from CRM to field inspections and personalized reporting—combined with Google Cloud’s deep expertise in key verticals, will further enable digital transformation across industries like financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, communication and media & entertainment.

Google Customers in ARTW Customer Database

Leveraging a rigorous data-centric research methodology, APPS RUN THE WORLD asks the simple question: Who’s buying Google applications and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. Our Customer database has over 100 data fields that detail company usage of Google and other enterprise apps by function, customer size, industry, location, implementation status, partner involvement, Line of Business Key Stakeholders and IT decision makers contact details. List of Verified Google Workspace, customers.

Google Key Enterprise and Cloud Applications

Google Workspace,

Google Revenues, $M:

Google Revenue Breakdown By Type, $M:

Google Enterprise Applications Revenues By Functional Markets, $M:

Google Enterprise Applications Revenues By Verticals, $M:

Google Revenues By Region, $M

Google Direct vs Indirect sales

Google Customers - Breakdown by Geo, Size, Vertical and Product

List of Verified Google Customers

No. of Google Customers: 6000000

No. of Google Enterprise Applications Customers: 6000000

No. of Google Cloud Customers: 6000000

No. of Google Cloud Subscribers: 6000000

The user base of Google Workspace has seen significant growth, with over 6 million paying businesses currently utilizing the platform. This number has increased from 5 million in February 2019. Furthermore, Google Workspace for Education has garnered a massive user base of 140 million worldwide. Additionally, the popular Google Workspace apps, Gmail and Drive, boast impressive numbers, with over 1.5 billion Gmail users and 1 billion monthly active users on Drive.

One of the standout features of Google Workspace is its video conferencing tool, Meet. Since January, Meet has experienced a remarkable surge in usage, with peak daily usage growing by a staggering 30 times. The platform now facilitates 3 billion minutes of video meetings and welcomes approximately 3 million new users every day. Notably, Google Meet is connecting people across 230 countries, fostering global collaboration and communication.

Several prominent companies have recently become customers of Google Workspace. For instance, PwC employees have collectively spent nearly 10 million hours in video conferencing using Google Meet. Colgate-Palmolive collaborated with SADA Systems to smoothly transition 28,000 individuals to Google Workspace. Nielsen, as part of its cloud-first strategy, successfully migrated all of its 56,000 users to Google Workspace within a span of 6 months, with the assistance of Maven Wave. Other notable companies, including Uber, Airbnb, PwC, Buzzfeed, and many more, consistently choose Google's productivity and collaboration apps, contributing to a remarkable count of 2.6 billion active users each month.

Google Market Opportunities, M&A and Geo Expansions

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has announced a strong performance in the third quarter, exceeding analyst expectations with a revenue of $76.6 billion, showcasing an 11% year-over-year increase. Google Cloud recorded a 40% year-over-year revenue surge to $8.4 billion. Google Cloud continues to focus on addressing business challenges, enhancing productivity and investing more than $100 billion in research and development in the last five years in support of these efforts.

Google has managed to onboard over a million new businesses on their productivity suite over the past year, thanks to its ease of use and security. Gmail blocks more than 99.9% of spam and phishing messages from ever reaching users’ inboxes. Google Voice, the online telephony solution is now available for Google Workspace customers of all sizes. It is tightly integrated with other Google Workspace apps like Google Meet and Google Calendar and its AI-powered features assist in voicemail transcription and spam filtering. Google Workspace productivity tools -- which include apps like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Chat, Meet, and more are designed with real-time collaboration and machine intelligence to help people work smarter.

Google Risks and Challenges

Alphabet's Google is facing a €2.1 billion ($2.3 billion) lawsuit from 32 European media groups, including Axel Springer and Schibsted, alleging losses incurred due to Google's alleged abuse of its dominant position in digital advertising. The publishers, spanning multiple European countries, claim that a less competitive market resulting from Google's practices led to financial losses. Citing previous regulatory actions, including a French competition authority fine and European Commission charges, the media groups contend that Google's misconduct negatively impacted their revenues. Google denies the allegations, describing the lawsuit as "speculative and opportunistic," while analysts suggest the legal action coincides with increased regulatory scrutiny on Google's ad-tech business and a broader challenge from generative AI chat to its core advertising model.

In February, Google faced controversy over its Gemini AI feature as users noticed the tool refraining from generating images of white individuals in historical contexts. Google swiftly paused the image generation, acknowledging issues in a blog post but not providing a detailed explanation, prompting concerns about the impact on AI and bias discussions. Critics say that Google acted quickly and didn't share enough information, which might make it harder to handle AI challenges responsibly.

Google Workspace now has over 2.6 billion monthly active users (MAUs), up from 2 billion MAUs for G Suite. That’s an impressive 30% jump in seven months, but Google’s ability to convert all those new users into paying customers is unclear.

While Google has secured millions of paid users with Google Workspace, its decision to make Google Meet free to anyone underscores the tremendous resources its parent Alphabet can bring to the table in a bare knuckle fight with upstarts like Zoom. Similarly, its YouTube division, the second most popular social network in the world, could be used as a key enabler for its enterprise cloud business as more companies new turn to digital events during the pandemic.

Similar to other big techs like Microsoft and Amazon, Alphabet is no stranger to criticism of its overreach, which inevitably raises antitrust concerns. Google has also been accused of mishandling personal data for advertising purposes especially with its hidden web tracking pages and Nest Cam offerings.

As a result, Google Cloud's successes will depend on the overall company's ability to handle all of the above issues from ensuring fair competition to mitigating security and privacy risks to prevent anyone from raising such concerns in the first place.

Google Ecosystem, Partners, Resellers and SI

Google's Cloud ecosystem comprises a vast network of over 6,000 Google Workspace resellers, who play a crucial role in promoting and selling Google Workspace. This collaborative effort showcases the widespread adoption of Google's productivity suite across various industries. Furthermore, Google has been strengthening its relationship with HP, a prominent technology company, to tap into a broader customer base within the enterprise sector.

As part of their collaboration, HP offers Chromebooks and other devices powered by Google's technology. These devices come preloaded with Google Workspace, enabling users to seamlessly access and utilize the suite's comprehensive set of productivity tools. This strategic partnership not only expands the availability of Google Workspace to more users but also demonstrates Google's commitment to delivering its cloud-based solutions to businesses of all sizes.

Google Cloud Infrastructure Insights

Subscribe to read more about:

• Google Public Cloud and Infrastructure (IaaS)
• Google Platform (PaaS)
• Google Application Delivery
• Google Private Cloud and Data Centers

Research Methodology

Data used in research reports are derived from publicly available documents, continuous surveys of applications vendors, customers, resellers, Independent Software Vendors, systems integrators and other verifiable sources.

Vendor shares and market forecast results are based on a combination of existing databases as well as demand side and supply side research conducted throughout the year with validation from vendors, customers, channel partners and documentations such as earnings releases and 10Q and 10K filings, vertical industry studies, regional and country-level statistics from public and private institutions(i.e. colleges, universities, government agencies and trade associations).

For additional information on our methodologies, here's the link: