G Suite is powering ahead with 4 million customers

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G Suite now has four million paying customers, and Google’s cloud business is already raking in a billion dollars per quarter, chief executive Sundar Pichai has revealed.

Google’s CEO Pichai made the revelations during a conference call following parent company Alphabet’s earnings announcement.

Google’s cloud business consists of the G Suite productivity apps – which effectively rival Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 – as well as Google Cloud Platform.

Pichai noted: “Google Cloud … has reached meaningful scale, and I'm excited to share today that it's already a billion dollar per quarter business.”

He further added that Google Cloud Platform is the fastest growing public cloud provider in the world, and that’s apparently based on publicly reported data for 2017.

As mentioned, G Suite now has four million paying customers, a number which has doubled in the past two years (as Reuters observed), representing impressive growth.

Office opportunities

Clearly, then, Google’s online productivity suite is forging ahead nicely, although it still has a long, long way to go when you look at Microsoft’s figures for Office 365. Last autumn, Office 365 crested 120 million business subscribers, and indeed according to Microsoft’s latest earnings report, it has just over 29 million consumer subscribers.

Microsoft is busy herding more folks towards Office 365, as well, with news this morning that the standalone non-subscription version of its next productivity suite, Office 2019, will only run on Windows 10. So if you don’t want to upgrade to the newest desktop OS, but wish to stay abreast of the latest Office features, then you’re pretty much being pushed into a subscription for Office 365.

And who knows, that cajoling might lead folks to explore other options – which may include G Suite, or indeed open source productivity suites.

Via CNBC

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