To get a sense of just how pervasive the digital shift has become, how connected we really are, and will be, in the Connected Economy — look to the cloud.
Earnings reports from the likes of Google (through its parent company Alphabet) and Amazon — and hyper-growth in their respective cloud operations — show that inflation, supply chains and the war in Europe cannot stop the inexorable rise of the digital way of life.
As reported in this space earlier in the week, Google Cloud was a significant contributor to Alphabet’s consolidated revenue boost, year over year, where total sales were up 13%. Within those sales, Google Cloud brought $6.2 billion, up from $4.6 billion last year, a nearly 35% gain.
Read more: AI, Search and Cloud Computing Propel Alphabet Earnings
During the conference call with analysts, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company has seen “momentum across Google Cloud Platform and Workspace.” He noted, too, that the company in June launched Google Public Sector in an effort to aid U.S. government agencies and public institutions in accelerating their digital transformations.
In terms of just why corporates and agencies are embracing the cloud, Pichai stated that “we unify data lakes, data warehouses, data governance and advanced machine learning into a single platform that can analyze data across any cloud” which in turn helps clients optimize operations.
And yet, said Pichai, “it still feels like we are in the early stages of this transformation.”
AWS Soars, Too
In a similar fashion, eCommerce giant Amazon’s push into the cloud has seen growth rates year over year topping 30%. Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought in $19.7 billion in sales, which was up 33%.
Read Also: Amazon Q2: Faster Delivery, Expanded Prime Benefits, Less Discounting Than Rivals
And CFO Brian Olsavsky said that the annualized sales run rate for this segment is nearly $79 billion.
“AWS continues to grow at a fast pace, and we believe we’re still in the early stages of enterprise and public sector adoption of the cloud. We see great opportunity to continue to make investments on behalf of AWS customers … Developers and organizations of all sizes, from governments and not-for-profits to start-ups and enterprises, continue to choose Amazon Web Services,” he said.
And in response to a question on the call about macro headwinds, and a slowdown in corporate spending, Olsavsky said that “we’re very happy with the growth rate. We’re happy with the adoption of the cloud.” The current environment may in fact be a boon for AWS, he noted, as corporate clients seek to control costs and seek out providers like Amazon.
“As you hit a potential rough patch in the economy … when [an enterprise is] trying to launch a new product or service and you have to face with building your own data center and getting capital for a data center … or moving to the cloud and essentially buying incremental infrastructure capacity, cloud computing really shows its value.”
All of this is proof positive that the Connected Economy’s rise is unstoppable. As PYMNTS’ research has shown, the eventual rise of super apps and other hyperconnected experiences will find a global, willing and ready audience of hundreds of millions of consumers, and the businesses that have embraced the cloud to meet them stand to reap some benefits: As much as $3.2 trillion in annual spend could come their way. With the cloud-based infrastructure in place to handle that demand, it seems the sky’s the limit.
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