Apple is Google's New Customer

Enterprise queen Diane Greene has set the ball rolling for Google straight away. Barely four months have passed, when Google brought in Greene to head its fledgling cloud computing business and she has already scored two big wins for the company. After winning over Spotify from Amazon last month, Apple will be Google’s new customer to use Google's Cloud Platform.

According to CRN Media, Apple has signed a contract worth between $400 million and $600 million though it’snot clear if this is the annual or total value of the contract.

Apple uses both Azure and AWS (Amazon web services)as a part of its iCloud services and is not expected to quit using AWS altogether. It would cut its spending on AWS by half in favor of the new contract.

This February, Morgan Stanley had estimated that Apple spends about $1 billion a year on AWS and plans to cut this cost as it builds new data centers in the U.S. and Europe. While it might seem strange for Apple to give business to a cloud service run by an arch rival in the smartphone category, such engagements aren’t exceptional in a public cloud market that’s seeing intense pricing pressure, particularly in compute and storage services.

The Greene Effect

Buying in Apple from Amazon is being credited to VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene’s efforts.

She is said to be aggressively forming partnerships to bring in large enterprise customers. Last month, Google signed up Spotify, which runs part of its streaming music service on AWS, as a cloud customer.

The company’s next big cloud customer could be Verizon Communications. According to CRN, one Verizon partner said the two companies are discussing the possibility of a “Google cloud with a Verizon wrapper.” Verizon is reportedly looking to sell many of the data centers that it owns, so a cloud partner would make sense for the carrier.