Takeaways From Google's Cloud Next Day 1

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) is hosting the Google Cloud Next 2017 Conference in San Francisco between March 8 and 10. The first day of the event saw significantly higher-than-expected interest in the platform and the company focused its increased capabilities, growing partner ecosystem and its competitive differentiators.

“These, along with the tremendous interest level, increase our confidence that Google can continue growing its cloud business and build it into a meaningful revenue and profit contributor over time,” Pacific Crest’s Andy Hargreaves said in a report. He maintained an Overweight rating and a price target of $1,040.

Large Attendance

The event attracted much higher than expected visitors, suggesting growing interest in the Google Cloud Platform [GCP].

Increased Capabilities, Growing Partner Ecosystem

Google has expanded its sales and support team and has expressed a desire to work with channel partners to help serve enterprise customers.

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“This seems to be generating solid early results, as Google had success stories with several large enterprises across a variety of workloads…Per our proprietary discussions with GCP partners and industry contacts, Google’s strategic choice to pursue a more hybrid cloud message versus AWS is attracting more channel support,” Hargreaves wrote.

Competitive Differentiators

Google is focusing on machine learning and data analytics as its competitive differentiators.

“If artificial intelligence and machine learning prove to have as applications as broad as we believe they could, Google's branding and capabilities around this could allow it to leapfrog competitors for important workloads,” the analyst commented.