Google Forms Links Between Apps for Work, Cloud Offerings

Google’s recent efforts to provide connectivity between its Google Drive and Cloud products could go a long way toward convincing longtime AWS and Microsoft customers to take a chance on the company’s business intelligence solutions.

In case you missed the news, the integration of Google Sheets with BigQuery marks the first time that users can instantly transfer data from one format to the other, whether it be turning Google Sheet info into analytics data or pushing BigQuery data to a Google spreadsheet.

While integration between the two previously separate solutions will ultimately result in greater ease of collaboration for users, the feature is a subtle but important step in cementing Google as the BI solution to beat when it comes to querying massive stacks of data in real time. Google’s efforts to create unity among its different platforms is also bound to give channel partners confidence that the company is serious about its business offerings.

Despite its ubiquitous nature as a powerhouse in nearly every aspect of the enterprise world, Google’s BI solutions are far from the only viable cloud-based data warehouse option available for companies looking to parse large amounts of data. Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the one to beat in terms of overall market share, but lacks the software to handle data queries on the scale of BigQuery, despite the existence of Amazon Redshift. Ditto for Microsoft (MSFT), whose Azure platform only has a preview version of SQL Data Warehouse, which was announced last year.

Google said it plans to add additional integration capabilities to the platform in the near future, but specific details as to how and when are anyone’s guess at this point. However, it isn’t hard to imagine Google eventually creating a completely unified offering between its Apps for Work and Cloud platform solutions, which could prove to be a worthy reason for the channel community to give Google the attention it is looking to garner.