Under CEO Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud has increasingly allowed customers to use its tools on other cloud platforms like Amazon and Microsoft's, and now one of its most popular data services will have that option, too.
This service — called BigQuery — is Google's flagship data warehouse tool for storing, protecting, and analyzing data. Many of Google Cloud's customers had been asking for a while to be able to use BigQuery on other clouds, says Debanjan Saha, vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google. The company is finally granting their wish.
On Tuesday, Google Cloud announced BigQuery Omni, which will give customers a consistent BigQuery experience across different clouds, whether Google Cloud or a rival cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. It can be difficult to use multiple clouds, Saha says, especially if data is stored in different places, but the new product allows customers to easily access it no matter where it's stored, including through creating dashboards to analyze it. With BigQuery Omni, customers don't need to manage the underlying infrastructure or hardware — the product is currently in private alpha for AWS, with Azure support coming soon.
"You know that we believe in customer choice and you have heard from Thomas and others that we believe that multi-cloud is the future," Saha said in a press call.
BigQuery Omni isn't Google Cloud's first foray into giving customers the option to use multiple clouds. Last year, Google Cloud announced a hybrid cloud product called Anthos, which allows customers to run their applications in Google Cloud, private data centers, or even another cloud. The approach is seen as pivotal to Google's strategy of catching up to Amazon and Microsoft, which is lags behind significantly in cloud market share.
Read more: Google Cloud is beating Amazon to the punch with Anthos, a new hybrid cloud offering
In addition, Google Cloud has made open source software a major focus by partnering with companies in that field. Often, companies choose to use open source software because it can be run on multiple clouds. In February, Google Cloud closed a $2.4 billion acquisition of Looker, which offers a data analytics product with capabilities to host on multiple clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Analysts expect Google Cloud to continue to make major acquisitions.
Kurian previously said that while Google Cloud is not dependent on acquisitions to grow, it will make acquisitions "appropriately when the time is right."
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