After Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. is poised to become the next cloud giant, an analyst said Monday.
Google’s cloud division, which offers businesses Web-based computing infrastructure, applications and services, could bring in $10 billion in revenue for the Internet giant, “potentially larger than YouTube,” Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a note.
“We demonstrate that Google is in the early stages of capitalizing on an ‘AWS-like’ strategy to offer a broad range of cloud services to small and medium-sized businesses and larger enterprises,” Sebastian said.
AWS refers toAmazon+Web+Services" target="_blank">Amazon+Web+Services" target="_blank">Amazon+Web+Services" target="_blank">Amazon+Web+Services" target="_blank">Amazon+Web+Services" target="_blank"> Amazon Web Services, which has underscored the growth potential of cloud computing, offering businesses Web-based, lower cost IT infrastructure and services.
Instead of setting up their own data centers and paying hefty licensing and maintenance fees, companies use another provider’s network paying only for the computing capacity they use.
It’s a fast-growing arena in which Google is well-positioned to expand.
“We believe that Google Apps alone could capture 20% share of the corporate e-mail market,” Sebastian wrote. “Just as important, Google is already able to address much of the public cloud stack including Google AppEngine and Google Compute Engine.”
Google’s cloud business could be “at least a $10 billion opportunity for Google, and like AWS, will likely lead to significant disruption for some traditional I/T vendors,” he added.
Google shares were down 0.8% in late morning trades on Monday.
