Dive Brief:
- Etsy Inc., an e-commerce platform for primarily hand-crafted goods, announced a five-year partnership with Google Cloud, reports the Wall Street Journal. Google will be Etsy's primary cloud provider, a shift from the company's "do-it-yourself approach to technology" and reliance on its own infrastructure.
- The migration to Google Cloud is expected to take about two years. Prior to choosing Google, Etsy's tech team tested various, undisclosed cloud providers since August, when CTO Mike Fisher started at the company.
- Etsy went with the cloud provider for its ML capabilities and tools that Google itself uses internally. ML is expected to aid Etsy's search capabilities and help customize customer experiences on the site, according to Fisher.
Dive Insight:
The emergence of the cloud afforded many companies once reliant on their own technical infrastructure to move that responsibility to third parties. However, digital transformation is a move of both financial necessity and trust.
Google is currently the third ranking cloud provider, but the company's cloud leader, Diane Greene, expects Google Cloud to beat out AWS by 2022. The Alphabet-owned company is quickly becoming more of an enterprise-friendly cloud provider.
However, many companies like Etsy depend on their own data centers, and for some, it makes sense. Some companies manage so much data that keeping it on-premise is a necessity, but there are alternatives to cloud adoption. The market also shifted to colocation.