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Google Cloud's market share has grown to 6% under CEO Thomas Kurian

While Microsoft Azure slowly closes on Amazon Web Services market leader position in the cloud sector, Google Cloud has been elbowing its way up the ladder with a handful of recent deals.

On Thursday, Google announced it clinched a contract with Box, the cloud-based file sharing company. The agreement will significantly expand Boxs existing cloud storage and computing contract with Google it has held since 2016. In addition, the two companies will further merge Googles G-Suite with Boxs file sharing services. The companies declined to provide information on the value of the contract, its length or what volume of data would be stored on Google Cloud.

[Box] could have chosen one of the others, says Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. The fact they chose us is a validation of both our technical capability and our go-to-market capability.

It is the latest in a string of contracts signed by Google, which beat Azure and AWS to win a 10-year contract with Deutsche Bank earlier this month, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom to manage public sector procurement in June. The service also won a contract with Major League Baseball, beating out AWS, in March.

The frequency of these deals has only increased in recent months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has prompted a surge in demand for public cloud services from major companies looking to move their networks off-premises. Amazon, Microsoft and Google have each reported booming revenue growth, with the current market expected to grow to $266 billion in revenue by the end of 2020, according to Gartner.

All of the cloud vendors have been growing in the pandemic, says Dave Bartoletti, a Forrester analyst. Google has always had a strategy of trying to be number two, or number one. They dont want to be stuck as the third largest cloud provider.

Under Kurian, who joined Google in January 2019 after leaving his role as president at Oracle, Google Cloud has grown its market share from 4.9% at the end of 2019 to 6% at the end of the first quarter, according to research firm Canalys. Microsoft Azure has grown from 14.5% to 17%, while Amazon has dipped from 33.4% to 32%.

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, says that the company also has existing cloud contracts with Azure, AWS and IBM. Box currently stores only 20% of data on public cloud networks, the company told Forbes, a figure it plans to grow to 80% in the next five years.

Levie declined to say whether the decision to grow its contract with Google was based on pricing, but says that Googles offering has centered on more openness between platforms, and encouraging a multi-cloud strategy. Collaboration between systems is the future of software, Levie says. Googles taking a leadership stance on that front.

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Google Cloud Claims Another Win With Box Partnership - Forbes