It’s no secret that the Google Cloud management team has decided to focus its efforts on a select number of enterprise verticals like healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, energy and life sciences. Retail, too, has long been a growth market for the company, especially as Amazon’s competitors are looking to run their services on clouds that are not AWS. Current customers include the likes of Kohl’s, Lowe’s and France’s Carrefour. It’s maybe no surprise then that Google today used NRF 2020, one of the largest retail events, to launch a number of updates to its services for retailers.
Some of the announcements today focus on specific vertical editions of existing services, including Google Cloud API Management for Retail, powered by Apigee, or Google Cloud Anthos for Retail, which specifically targets retailers that want to modernize their store operations and infrastructure. There is also Google Cloud Search for Retail, powered by Google Search, which promises to bring better product search results to a retailer’s applications.
In addition, Google is also expanding programs like its Retail Acceleration Program to more customers and making its white-glove Customer Reliability Engineering service, which helps retailers better plan for and manage their peak shopping days, available to more customers.
What’s maybe more interesting, though, is new services like Google Cloud 1:1 Engagement for Retail, “a blueprint and best-practice guide on how to build these types of data-driven solutions effectively and with less up-front cost.” The idea here is to help retailers make use of Google’s big data platform to build personalization and recommendation models to better understand and engage their customers.
Also new is a buy optimization and demand forecasting service that aims to help retailers better plan their logistics operations.
We’ll likely see Google use a similar playbook for more verticals over time. We know that Google Cloud has ambitions to become the #2 cloud within a few years and to do so, it needs to get large enterprises — and especially those that are still trying to figure out their cloud strategies — to opt for its services.
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