Cloud Roundup: Google Cloud-Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro, IBM, Oracle, More

Only halfway through the week, the cloud computing sector is exploding with news. For starters, Google Cloud has come out swinging with an avalanche of announcements. Look for deals with consultancy Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro Cloud and a milestone achievement with managed service provider Softchoice.

All of those tidbits underscore that Google Cloud, still the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, is making good on its goals to gain market share against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It might even make a profit (the company to date remains unprofitable and executives seem less inclined to worry about that than they are to act on vision.)

Google Cloud has been making much of its headway through its indirect channel relationships. The company has appointed a new channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani, to guide that strategy. It’s also consolidating its direct and indirect sales into one organization. (Recall that Carolee Gearhart has left the vendor after a little more than three years.) In fact, we have a Q&A forthcoming with Jim Anderson, who now leads Google Cloud’s direct sales teams. We’ll have that for you soon.

In the meantime, though, IBM has some application modernization intentions via its IBM Z as a service on IBM Cloud. This concerns the hybrid cloud. Next, MSP Ensono has achieved a cloud milestone with Microsoft Azure. And fellow MSP Thirdera, which specializes in ServiceNow, has launched a platform partners can use. Finally, Oracle Cloud has secured – no pun intended – U.S. Department of Defense approval to process sensitive Air Force data. That’s significant, given that few cloud providers hold such high-level permissions.

Finally, we already covered Akamai Technologies’ pending acquisition of Linode — read that here. As a quick recap, though, Akamai is buying the independent cloud computing provider for $900 million in cash. We’re still working to find out what this deal means for the indirect channel, since Akamai targets large enterprises and Linode aims more at smaller businesses, often through managed service providers.

Check out all the cloud computing news you need to know, in the slideshow above.