Google teams up with Intel to boost cloud adoption

In a bid to accelerate adoption of the cloud by enterprises, Google today announced a “strategic” alliance with Intel to bring together its cloud and the latter’s hardware expertises in one platform. While Google and Intel have been working closely for many years to engineer and validate processor technology within the data center, the new alliance will allow Google to explore technology solutions for their enterprise customers and help them move from legacy infrastructure to an open, secure and future-proof cloud.

“We are deeply committed to driving broad proliferation of technology advancements which is why our new strategic alliance with Google, offers promise towards the goal of technology innovation fueled by the scale and performance of multi-cloud deployments, the reach of the Internet of Things, and the opportunities of new workloads like machine learning,” Intel’s Vice President of Data Center Group, Raejeanne Skillern, wrote in a blog.

According to 451 Research, although emerging companies and new applications are being developed in the cloud, only 41 percent of all enterprise workloads are running in a public or private cloud. By mid-2018, that number will be up to 60 percent.

Focus of Google & Intel alliance

The primary focus of the alliance would be on combining Google Cloud software capabilities with Intel’s advanced hardware. By doing so, it will optimize Google’s home-grown ‘Kubernetes’ open source container management platform for Intel architecture. This will support a broad range of workloads on multi-cloud environments. Intel and Google engineers have already delivered code optimizations that have improved feature transparency on Intel architecture. The alliance will accelerate open source TensorFlow performance on Intel processors, integrating high-performance libraries such as the Math Kernel library (MKL) into TensorFlow, and optimizing memory allocation and data layer operations across a range of topologies. The two technology giants will also create a secure platform for connecting Intel’s IoT edge devices to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), where the data can be analyzed to inform better decisions. This will benefit industries such as manufacturing. To improve security for enterprise customers, the alliance will also focus on integrations between Intel hardware and GCP infrastructure. Google also announced that apart from cloud solutions, the partnership with Intel will focus on developing technical education and market development materials to support IT practitioners who manage transition to a multi-cloud world.