Customers have finally succeeded in dragging cloud providers kicking and screaming into their hybrid computing reality. Most aren’t ditching their on-premises data centers just yet, and vendors have gotten the message. Google Cloud Platform has joined the party, saying all the right words about hybrid-cloud and multicloud choice and portability. But does it actually have the tools for the job?

“Some of the message on where Google fits in that hybrid and multicloud world is a little bit muddy to me,” said Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

The big announcement at Google Cloud Next this week in San Francisco was Anthos, a rebranded and updated hybrid platform formerly called Cloud Services Platform. What do we know about Anthos? It essentially taps the cloud-on-premises partner du jour VMware Inc. to put cloud services in the data center. Is this good enough to get Google out of third place in public-cloud market share to challenge No. 1 Amazon Web Services and its own hybrid strategy?

Miniman and co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante analyzed the cloud computing market and Google’s position in it throughout Cloud Next. In this closing analysis, they discussed Google’s unique value proposition — or lack of one — in multicloud (see the full interview with transcript here). 

Cloudiest cloud moves to hybrid middle

The lack of grandstanding as the cloudiest of clouds at the show was a bit surprising, according to Vellante. “What I would have liked to hear right upfront was: ‘We know that 80% of your workloads are on-prem … and we’re investing in scale and all that stuff — but we’re the best at cloud-native, and we have the tools and expertise, and we’re going to bring those to you on your premises and show you how to get there,'” he said.

Whether Google really is the best at cloud-native is debatable, Furrier countered. It does not have the breadth and depth of AWS, he explained. “But I don’t think that that’s the hardcore stake in the ground, because cloud-native is early,” he said.

What enterprises today hunger for are easy ways to modernize on-premises apps and shift them to and from cloud. “The workload conversation I don’t think was front-and-center enough,” Furrier said.

However, Google provided an enticing demo of no-code modification and migration of workloads. “If that actually happens, that’s going to be a critical piece of the pie — that’s going to move the needle very quickly for Google,” Furrier said.

Here’s the complete video interview analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of Google Cloud Next this week:

Photo: Google Cloud