Let’s size up Google Compute Engine, Amazon AWS and the rest of the Cloud field. While the “who” is important, the “where” they’ll be competing in is equally important. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be a key development to watch in Google Compute Engine’s (GCE) ecosystem to determine its maturity in the public cloud sector. If Google is going to truly cut into any of the AWS pie, it will need to mature and evolve its SLA. An SLA is the governing document between vendor and customer, and good customer service is one heck of a differentiator for a company entering a new market.

Over the next four days we’ll be covering what CIOs need to know and consider for GCE.  Topping the list is SLAs, to be followed by pricing, the pros and cons of GCE and Google’s pipeline for its latest cloud product. Our coverage this week is aimed to highlight who the competitors are, and what areas to look for differentiation and as a gauge for who’s gaining market share. Up first, SLAs.

Senior Wikibon Analyst Stu Miniman recently provided a Vendor Survival Guide for Competing with Amazon AWS; and in that survival guide he explained that the vendor (in our case GCE) has to meet the speed and ease of AWS. GCE must “put forth the business case for an alternative that differentiates and clearly communicates why and how they are different”. While Google has made its SLA easy to find, the caution to companies is that any outage will result in a “Percentage of monthly bill credited to future monthly bills of Customer”; hardly comforting to any enterprise company that might consider using GCE for a production workload.

Google, known for its self-serve customer service approach, needs to double down on its support with GCE if it hopes to compete with Amazon’s or even Rackspace’s hands-on approach to support. Equally so, 24x7x365 phone support would be a well-positioned service offering to gain new enterprises and/or help lure them away from AWS. Wikibon identifies performance, cost, control and support as the key differentiator pillars for AWS rivals.

CIOs are looking for deeper relationships to find new value by using the cloud beyond simply lowering costs. Amazon is quickly growing its tentacles to reach deeper and deeper into the enterprise ecosystem. Google has the resources to match, but will it put forth the effort to effectively do so is to be determined.