Dive Brief:

• Google won’t use price as a differentiator for its cloud offerings, Tariq Shaukat, president of customers at Google Cloud, told CNBC last week.

• "We believe that our pricing models are much more friendly," said Shaukat. "So just simply by adopting the more flexible pricing models we have, things like billing by the minute rather than the hour, we think we can save a typical company 20% to 30% without having a unit price different to the competition."

• For Google, it's also about what products it has to offer, turning to value as a differentiator. Google's expertise in data management, machine learning and artificial intelligence will help drive adoption, according to Shaukat.

Dive Insight:

The battle in the cloud has feverishly increased as companies vye for the profitable hosting market. Both Amazon and Google cut their cloud prices in 2016, and Microsoft followed suit this year. But Google thinks price cuts aren't enough for customers and won't help increase loyalty long term. 

Google wants to prove it can win in the cloud wars without having to cut prices. For example, last November, Google announced it was creating a Google Cloud Machine Learning group that will focus on delivering cloud-based machine learning solutions to businesses. 

Cloud companies can only compete on price for so long before their margins disappear. Virtual machines have been the traditional battleground for price cuts among cloud providers, but recently cloud price wars have migrated from virtual machines to object storage, according to an analysis of cloud pricing by 451 Research.

Even with competition to offer the lowest price, this is still a huge market for cloud providers. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues — including public and private cloud, hardware and software — reached $70 billion in 2016 and continue to grow at a double-digit pace, according to a recent report from Synergy Research.