Second place or bust.
Executives at Google have launched a five-year effort to pull the tech giant’s struggling cloud-computing unit out of third place in the red-hot niche, according to a report.
Officials at the Silicon Valley-based search giant, however, are less than confident they can become the industry leader, and instead have merely set a goal to land the No. 2 spot by 2023, tech site The Information reported on Tuesday.
Google, according to the report, expects it will still lag behind either Amazon’s AWS unit or Microsoft’s Azure service.
The second-banana plan was born in 2018 when Google co-founder Larry Page felt that third place was unacceptable and was considering exiting the space altogether, the tech site said.
Later Page, Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat agreed to a five-year plan that would focus on growth. Should the plan fail to meet its goal, Alphabet still might pull out of cloud computing altogether, the report said.
Google currently trails Amazon, Microsoft in the US, as well as Alibaba in China in the cloud business, which sells computer-processing power to government agencies and major companies, such as video-streaming services like Netflix.
In July, Pichai said that Google Cloud had reached $8 billion in annualized revenue.