Google Teams With PricewaterhouseCoopers To Get More Enterprises Using Its Cloud

Google, which is looking for enterprise customers to embrace its cloud computing portfolio, just landed one of the world's biggest.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a London-based professional services firm with more than 195,000 employees worldwide, plans to use Google Apps For Work for 45,000 employees in the U.S. and Australia, Google said Tuesday.

This is more than just a customer win for Google Apps. PwC will also pitch Google products, including Android and Drive For Work, as a way for its customers to move to the cloud, Amit Singh, president of Google for Work, said in a blog post.

[Related: Google Dumps 'Enterprise' Branding, Renames Business Products 'Google For Work']

PwC will also steer its customers to develop custom apps and mobile offerings on Google Cloud Platform, which includes its Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, Singh said in the blog.

PwC plans to beef up its security monitoring practice by tapping into expertise from Google's team of 450 security engineers and build new offerings on Google Cloud Platform, according to Singh.

"By building custom algorithms on Google Cloud Platform, PwC will identify security threats, alert clients of potential attacks and prevent or mitigate risks," Singh said in the blog post.

Google's security team doesn't get much attention, but partners see this aspect of the PwC partnership as one of the most important.

"PwC is a service firm known to lead by example, and they also handle their clients' most sensitive data," Allen Falcon, CEO of Westborough, Mass.-based Google partner Cumulus Global, told CRN.

PWC's move to Google Apps for Work will show enterprise and mid-market firms that cloud -- and Google Apps in particular -- is a "safe and strategically sound move," Falcon said.

Google has been targeting enterprise customers for years, but the search giant’s enterprise products are believed to account for around 5 percent of its overall business. Teaming with PwC could help Google boost this figure and take on a bigger role in the enterprise market.

Google last month hired Brian Stevens, the highly regarded former CTO at Red Hat, as vice president of cloud platforms. The Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor has hired several enterprise sales and business development experts from Oracle, Salesforce.com and Microsoft in recent years.

Google also decided last month to stop using the word "enterprise" in its product branding, opting instead to label them as Google For Work.

The goal was to align the branding of Google's business products with the manner in which customers are using them, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the time.

"We never set out to create a traditional 'enterprise' business -- we wanted to create a new way of doing work. So the time has come for our name to catch up with our ambition," Schmidt said in a blog post last month announcing the change.

PUBLISHED OCT. 28, 2014