Google Cloud is currently a distant third place on the podium with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Is this not odd for a company with such enviable tech inside its own walls? And can Google turn its collection of geeky IT tools, particularly those in artificial intelligence, into a comprehensive offer that enterprises can’t refuse?

“[Google is] about 10 years ahead of where enterprises are in terms of building and deploying applications,” said Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint Ventures. He is confident in Google Cloud Senior Vice President Diane Greene’s leadership and pointed to her previous success with VMware Inc. and virtualization.

Raney said it is now easier than ever for startups to enter the enterprise market. He spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, California studio to discuss news from the Google Cloud Next 2017 event.

Where it used to take $10 to $20 million to develop a technology in search of a product, companies now spend $2 million developing a product, try it out on open source and see if it gets traction, Raney stated, adding that companies can then offer up-sells like service support.

Google Cloud’s strength is in its use-case-ready products, which enterprises are increasingly demanding instead simply Saas tools that automate processes, Raney explained.

“What you have to do is deliver insights” that make people better at their jobs, he said, and Google is equipped to do that with AI tools that differentiate them and deliver what developers want.

Algorithms a service?

“Every pitch we see has machine learning in it,” Raney said, adding that entrepreneurs want tools that allow them to easily add AI to the apps they develop.

“Google is actually extremely well positioned to kind of drive that forward for developers based on all of the work that they’ve done internally,” he said. With TensorFlow, an open-source software library for Machine Intelligence, Google is driving the commodification of AI algorithms. He said that Redpoint wants to invest in developers who can pair these algorithms with unique proprietary data to produce insights.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2017.

Photo: SiliconANGLE