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Google joins forces with Telefónica and opens its first data center region in Spain

2020-06-11T14:44:42.481Z


The agreement comes at the height of the cloud use boom due to the pandemic and will help Telefónica Tech to achieve its goal of entering 1 billion in 2022 through the 'cloud'


Google has decided to take out all its artillery to fight the cloud computing in Spain. After announcing Amazon that it is going to open three data centers in Spain and Microsoft an alliance with Telefónica to boost its local clouds, it is now Google that closes an alliance with the operator that José María Álvarez-Pallete presides to boost its computing business in the cloud. With this movement, three of the four technological giants that dominate the cloud in the world (Alibaba would be missing) will have local infrastructure to help Spanish companies take advantage of all that the cloud can offer them.

As part of the alliance between Google and Telefónica, the Mountain View company will open a Google Cloud region in Madrid that will take advantage of the infrastructure that teleco has in the Spanish capital, which has, as detailed, “with the highest international standards of security and data protection ”. With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in Spain will benefit from the low latency and high performance of their workflows and data hosted in the cloud.

The region will have three zones to guard against service disruptions, and will launch with a package of key Google products, including Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery. Google boasts of being very strong in big data, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence; also in containers (the new technology to bring applications to portable environments), in open source and in multicloud , something key because a high percentage of customers do not want to be tied to a single provider.

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The alliance with Google is also a boost for Tech, the new technology services division created by Telefónica in late November, which has one of its main businesses in the cloud , along with cybersecurity and the Internet of Things (IoT). The teleco, which in 2019 obtained revenues of 697 million euros (18% more than in 2018) from its cloud business , aims for this subsidiary to generate more than 2,000 million revenues for the group in 2022, and the cloud would provide the fifty%.

With this collaboration, both companies intend to combine Google's Mobile Edge Computing platform with Telefónica's experience in networks to jointly define, develop and offer 5G offers for companies and consumers. They will also join efforts to offer Google Cloud "innovative solutions" to the public and private sectors in all the markets in which Telefónica operates. "Our goal is to accelerate cloud adoption by both large and small organizations in all industries, and to provide advanced infrastructure and software that meets their needs," they say.

The moment could not be more opportune, since the pandemic caused by the Covid-19 is causing many companies to search the cloud for the solution to many of their technological problems, since it provides infrastructure and tools in an agile, scalable, flexible and secure way. , according to the partners.

"The unusual situation we have had to live in, marked by the confinement of the world population and the exponential increase in telework and online education and entertainment, has highlighted the vital importance of connectivity and digitalization for the operation of society, "says Álvarez-Pallete. The CEO of Telefónica adds that with this alliance" we want to fulfill our social commitment and promote the recovery of the economy by helping companies and public administration not only to recover the ground lost by the crisis but also to accelerate its digital transformation and become stronger for the future ”.

For his part, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, claims to be "very happy" to partner with Telefónica and launch a new cloud region in Spain with which they hope, he says, "to help Spanish companies find new ways to innovate and prosper, as we contribute to the country's economic recovery. ” "Helping companies adapt to a constantly changing world has always been a priority goal for Google before and during the Covid-19 crisis," he adds.

Both partners believe that cloud computing is in its infancy, with only 17% of total IT spending spent on the cloud . As Isaac Hernández, CEO of Google Cloud Iberia, warned, in a recent interview with CincoDías while worldwide between 15% and 20% of workloads are already in the cloud, in Spain it does not even reach 5%, "So everything is yet to be defined." And both Google and Telefónica want to be big cloud providers .

According to Gartner, the global market for public cloud services will grow 17% this year to $ 228 billion. Google, which sees the cloud as a clear way to diversify its sources of income, obtained a turnover of $ 8.918 million in 2019 for its cloud business , 3 billion more than in 2018.

With the new agreement, the Telefónica Group will use Google's cloud technologies to drive its own internal process of digital transformation, in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analysis, and application development.

This new alliance is a further step in the collaboration started last year when Google Cloud solutions were included in Telefónica's global B2B catalog, and which was followed earlier this year with an agreement through ElevenPaths and Chronicle to offer services of cybersecurity to companies in Europe and Latin America.

The three 'kings' of the cloud bet on Spain

Sources familiar with the Google-Telefónica agreement highlight how relevant it is that the three cloud giants are betting on Spain in their strategy to be closer to customers, due to the importance of technical requirements and latencies and also to the highest sensitivity to the location of the data. "The arrival of these companies supposes investment for the country and more offer that accelerates the digital transformation of Spanish companies to boost the competitiveness of Spain", added the same sources.

In this context, Telefónica has also known how to play its cards well. Knowing that the American giants were going to need close partners to customers, who offered them consulting and services around the cloud , she has managed to close two very relevant agreements in just four months, in February with Microsoft and now with Google. Also in May 2018, it signed a global alliance with Amazon for teleco to include the cloud services of the American giant in its offer for companies.

Google, which according to Gartner has a 4% market share in the cloud (compared to Amazon and Microsoft, which account for 47.8% and 15.5%, respectively), currently has 26 data center regions in the world (with more than 60 data centers ), six in Europe (London, Belgium, the Netherlands, Zurich, Frankfurt, Finland, in addition to now Spain). Soon they will also have in France and Italy. In the past three years, the firm's investment in data centers and the fiber to connect them has been around 50,000 million dollars.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-06-11

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