“In its bid to raise its name in cloud computing services, Google nabbed a big-name customer: Apple,” Mark Bergen reports for Re/code. “The iPhone maker recently started storing portions of its iCloud and services data with Google’s cloud platform, according to sources familiar with the deal.”
“It’s a win for Google, which is gunning for larger companies as cloud customers,” Bergen reports. “But it might be short-lived, as it looks like Apple is also simultaneously building out its own system to bring data stored on its millions of devices in house.”
“Currently, much of Apple’s iCloud luggage sits with Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud provider by a long mile, and also with Microsoft’s Azure,” Bergen reports. “CRN, the publication which first reported the news, claims that Apple is trimming its reliance on AWS by turning to Google. At minimum, Apple would seem to be adding Google to the mix.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The buildout of Apple Data centers around the world continues with abandon.
SEE ALSO:
Apple signs on with Google Cloud Platform, cuts spending with Amazon Web Services – March 17, 2016
Sleeping with the enemy
This is common, Apple has used competition in the past. Most recently, Samsung was helping Apple to build the processors for these devices. It always feels weird for me too, but I just have to remember, business is business and if your customer is your opponent, you may have to make services that much better for the opponent so not to get blame if something goes wrong.
Money talks…
Does Apple need the money that desperately?
No but google dies. And apple has few other choices, until their own system is in place.
How many server farms does Apple need? I am totally unaware of how much space is necessary.
Apparently, Amazon is by far the most powerful player in Cloud services. Their capacity is five times as big as the next competitor, which is Microsoft, followed by IBM and Google. Apple is still a small player (when it comes to capacity). Keep in mind, millions of consumers using iCloud doesn’t really represent a huge market share for a Cloud service, when all they use is a bit of storage (at most 5GB each, on average), and practically zero processing (webmail, iWork online, etc). Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, they all service enterprise customers, whose processing and data storage requirements are far greater.
Good it seems those on the other thread who claimed its simply not worth Apple getting involved with its own setup and bring it in house despite this being a substantial part of the future, were being short sighted after all. Shame Apple wasn’t a little more far sighted a little earlier mind but better late than never.
There was an excellent article in the New York Times about Dropbox moving from Amazon services to their own recently.
The bottom line was that with Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, they’re a great way to get started. The economy of scale allows them to offer pricing that startups, or larger companies with smaller needs can’t meet on their own. Additionally, it’s a question of manpower, resources and distraction from building the service that is the core of the business itself.
Eventually some startups, like Dropbox, end up getting big enough and established enough, that moving to their own infrastructure makes sense. Ironically, Dropbox is able to make this more cost effective or even profitable by providing the same services to others.
In Apple’s case, it seems as if the services they want to provide greatly exceed certain resources needed to build out given the high demand.
This is a better problem to have.
Eventually, they’ll be able to build out and bring it all in house and realize cost savings (as well as flexibility and control). In the meantime, it’s interesting that Apple needs all 3 of the biggest companies to meet their needs.
Part of the decision to move ‘out’ on their own probably involves considering taking up the load of supporting their customers’ service level based on how geologically spread out they are. Apple probably is in the same bind and needs to build out their servers in a larger range of locations. In the meantime outsourcing that to other companies that are already there is simply good business sense.