Salesforce isn ’ t usually thought of as a cloud company , but it should be . It ’ s the biggest SaaS vendor in the world and has evolved far beyond its traditional sales base to become ‘ the customer company ’. It now has a range of cloud applications for customer engagement more generally , plus it has started to offer industryspecific clouds in manufacturing , government , philanthropy and others . It continues to develop new technologies and is seen as one of the primary drivers of cloud computing globally .

Google is investing heavily in cloud , posting operating losses while it builds out what it hopes will become an industry leading set of services , including AI , API management , analytics , databases and IoT . It has a productivity suite – G Suite – to compete with Microsoft Teams and has built a number of industry solutions in retail , manufacturing , healthcare , energy , financial services , media , government and education . Currently underperforming against AWS and Microsoft , Google clearly sees a future as more than a bronze medallist in the cloud Olympics .

148 August 2021