Google Compute Engine Cloud: What’s In It for Partners?

Say hello to Google’s latest cloud platform, the Google Compute Engine. Announced at Google I/O, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform seeks to challenge Amazon Web Services and, in particular, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). What remains to be scene: How do VARs, MSPs and cloud partners (integrators, brokers and aggregators) fit into Google’s IaaS strategy?

According to Google’s teaser, “Run your large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure.”

The Google Compute Engine is part of a growing portfolio of Google cloud services, including:

• Google App Engine (platform as a service, or PaaS)
• Google Cloud Storage
• Google BigQuery (for Big Data analysis)
• Google Apps (a software as a service portfolio)

Cloud-focused partners including Numerate, Opscode, PuppetLabs and RightScale say they will integrate with Google Compute Engine.

InformationWeek has posted a Google Compute Engine review, saying that it offers a stable, reliable, and fast provider of on-demand computing resources. But it offers fewer features than rival Amazon Web Services.

Translation: Google is in the game but it will take time to potentially close the capabilities gap with Amazon.

The Bigger Google Story

This week’s Google I/O conference highlights how Google is becoming both a consumer company while also pushing deeper into the corporate cloud market.

Most of yesterday’s announcements (June 27) involved consumer-driven products such as the Nexus 7 Tablet and the Nexus Q (a multimedia streaming system). Today Google shifted its focus to business users and cloud application developers.

Google Compute Engine and the Channel

While Google and Amazon are massive mainstream names, both companies will need to take steps to engage VARs, MSPs and cloud integrators seeking IaaS platforms.

Already, a growing list of smaller but very nimble IaaS providers have channel partner programs. Names to know include Artisan Infrastructure, 6fusion and Rackspace.

Google certainly has a big, mainstream brand. And generally speaking, I think customers trust Google to deliver a reliable, scalable cloud service. Where channel partners fit into that conversation, however, remains to be seen.

Google Apps has a strong, growing channel following — especially among pure-play SaaS integrators. Will those integrators jump toward IaaS as well? Talkin’ Cloud is checking.