In a move that is meant to undermine Amazon's lead in the enterprise cloud industry, Google is giving away $100,000 in yearly credits to attract startups to host their resources on Google's servers.
Google senior vice president of technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle introduced Google Cloud Platform for Startups at the search company's Google for Entrepreneurs Global Partner Summit on Friday.
The program aims to provide technology startups an infrastructure where they can use Google's cloud storage, databases, endpoints, DNS and other cloud services for developing their products, while luring them away from Amazon's Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is still the preferred provider of cloud services to enterprises because of its longer track record and a wider variety of computing services.
"We want developers to focus on code, not worry about managing infrastructure," says Julie Pearl, developer relations director at Google, in a blog post. "Starting today, startups can take advantage of this offer and begin using the same infrastructure platform we use at Google."
The $100,000 in credits come with a caveat, though. For starters, only startups that are part of a Google-approved accelerator, incubator or venture capital fund are qualified to join the program. These partners include the likes of Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Code for America, Tech Stars and, of course, Google's own Google Ventures.
Startups must also be making not more than $500,000 in revenue and must not have received more than $5 million in earlier funding. Furthermore, startups that have received cloud credits elsewhere are disqualified from the program. Aside from the credits, qualified startups will receive 24/7 technical support via phone and one-to-one technical architecture reviews with Google's cloud experts.
Although Amazon remains the leader in cloud computing services, the price war launched by Google and Microsoft, which touts its own Azure cloud platform for enterprises, has taken its toll on Amazon. Earlier this year, Amazon chief financial officer Tom Szkutak said that it the e-commerce company has seen less-than-expected revenue from AWS due to numerous price cuts as much as 50%.
Amazon also has a program not unlike Google's. Dubbed AWS Activate, the program offers $15,000 in cloud credits to startups belonging to accelerators, incubators and VC funds. Microsoft also offers a similar program through Azure's BizSpark. However, the $150 in monthly credits Microsoft offers pales in comparison to Amazon's and Google's.
However, most startups will likely not be able to use all the $100,000 worth of credits, unless they need extra resources for heavy computing or end up becoming extremely popular like Snapchat, which, as Google likes to note, uses Google's servers for the 700 million photos and videos sent through the disappearing messages app every day.
