Google And Intel Strengthen Ties To Drive Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Google said on Thursday it would work closer with chipmaker Intel to drive more customers to the cloud by integrating their respective software and hardware capabilities to better power container management, machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) workloads.

Nan Boden, Google's head of global technology partners, blogged that the strategic alliance will better pair the software Google runs in its hyper-scale cloud facilities with Intel's chips around those cutting-edge technologies.

"We’ve worked closely with Intel for years on data center processor technology, and are now expanding our collaboration to help enterprise customers move from legacy infrastructure to an open, secure and future-proof cloud," Boden said.

[Related: Google Rebrands Enterprise Business As Google Cloud, And Apps As G Suite]

The strategic alliance will focus not only on technology integrations but also on joint marketing and education efforts geared to the vendors' channels, Boden said.

"With this new alliance, we'll explore technology solutions for our enterprise customers in the areas of Kubernetes, machine learning, IoT and security, combining Google Cloud software capabilities with Intel’s advanced hardware," Boden said.

Through the alliance, Google will work to optimize Kubernetes, the container orchestration technology it developed internally and then later open sourced, for Intel's hardware architecture.

As to its machine learning platform, Google's TensorFlow library of algorithms will be optimized to better leverage the capability of Intel CPUs .

On the IoT front, the two vendors will mutually develop a platform connecting Intel devices deployed in the field to Google's cloud infrastructure.

And the entire collaboration will involve enhancing security integrations.

Google and Intel have declared it a priority to support partners in gaining skills and developing their businesses.

"In addition to exploring a number of new joint cloud solutions, with Intel, we’re focused on developing technical education and market development materials that support the IT practitioners who are managing the transition to a multi-cloud world," Boden said.

Dj Das, CEO of Third Eye Consulting, a Google partner based in San Francisco, said Intel needs such alliances because the chipmaker has found itself in a tough position in the market, having missed the wave of developing CPUs for mobile phones, and with Nvidia driving the trend toward GPUs for computationally intensive workloads.

To compensate, Intel has been looking to partner on optimizing its chips for various cloud services providers.

They engaged with Cloudera to optimize their CPUs for the Hadoop stack, Das said, and Third Eye

worked on a similar project jointly funded by Intel and Amazon.

"It's good that they are partnering up with [Google Cloud Platform] too," Das said. And "it's good for GCP as they really need more enterprise customers."