Google announced major win over Amazon: Target is using Google’s cloud.

Google’s head of cloud
Diane Greene with Target CIO Mike McNamara
Google/Business Insider screen
capture

• Google Cloud Platform CEO Diane Greene has officially
  announced that Target is a customer.
• This is the kind of large company that Google’s cloud
  needs to sign to show that it’s a player.
• It’s also a kick in the shins from Google at the cloud
  computing leader, Amazon Web Services.

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Google Cloud chief, Diane Greene announced Monday at Google’s
Next 2018 conference that Target, one of the country’s largest
retailers, is using Google Cloud Platform.

Greene hinted that this relationship wasn’t new, that Google’s
cloud was helping Target back during last year’s Christmas
season.

But it’s still a major moment for Google as the company attempts
to lure large customers away from market leader Amazon Web
Services and the acknowledged No. 2 cloud player, Microsoft’s
Azure. Since Google is playing catch up, the company has
relentlessly trumpeted the superiority of its technology. 

Mike McNamara, Target’s CIO, joined Greene on stage. When
Greene asked him why Target chose Google, he said that it
wasn’t 
really him but Target’s engineers that
chose. 

“I think Target and Google have a lot of shared values. We
learned learned a lot already from Google about site reliability.
At the end of the day it wasn’t me. It was my
engineers,” McNamara said.

That’s music to the ears of Google’s Greene. Her constant message
is that Google’s technology and expertise is superior to the
rivals and appeals most to the techies who actually have to use
it.

But it also a not-so-subtle kick at Amazon’s shins. Amazon’s
massive ecommerce business has been wrecking havoc in the retail
world and the open secret in the cloud world is that many
retailers won’t use AWS, period. This is Google’s way of telling
all industries that feel threatened by Amazon (which includes
more than retail), that Google is waiting with open arms to help
them.

Target is the kind of large company that Google needs to sign to
show that it’s a player in cloud, analysts say. Target operates
more than 1,800 stores throughout the United States and for the
past fiscal year booked $71 billion.