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Customers and partners come first at the new Google Cloud

Welcome to Protocol | Enterprise, your comprehensive roundup of everything you need to know about cloud and enterprise software. This Thursday: Google Cloud's Big Business parade, how ServiceNow will get to $15 billion in revenue, and the chip shortage has no end in sight.
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Google Cloud had two big messages this week during its Google Cloud Next event: It has big-name customers, and it's super easy to contact its sales team.
That's where Google Cloud — which has struggled to keep up with AWS and Microsoft — finds itself almost three years after CEO Thomas Kurian took over the division. The longtime knock on Google Cloud prior to Kurian's arrival was that its engineering-driven organization didn't understand how to work with the average enterprise customer. It's clearly trying to dispel that notion.
Google put the enterprise front and center this week, emphasizing the breadth and depth of its customer base while tweaking its two main rivals in the process.
It also put the spotlight on several partnerships with other enterprise tech companies, part of a years-long jockeying for position between the Big Three infrastructure cloud providers and the biggest names in data and enterprise software.
Wanted the next killer cloud service? Sorry, not this week. In terms of exciting stuff that Google Cloud was actually planning to ship, this was a light event.
The emphasis at Google Cloud these days is clear: The company is looking to meet customers and partners where they are, and to work together in ways that make the most sense. As Pichai and Kurian spoke, it was almost impossible to miss the giant "Contact sales" button underneath the YouTube stream of the event.
And pretty soon, it will be possible to attend one of these events in person and hear firsthand, in the moment, how enterprise buyers are responding to Google Cloud's strategy.
— Tom Krazit
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Partner up: At SAP, Bill McDermott pursued a growth strategy heavily reliant on M&A, but he's taking a different tack at ServiceNow. Protocol's Joe Williams interviewed McDermott as part of our Inside View virtual event series, where he described how ServiceNow plans to reach $15 billion in revenue by emphasizing partnerships.
DevIPOs: GitLab stock is expected to trade on the Nasdaq later today, hoping to draw public investor interest in its software-development pipeline tools. Protocol's Hirsh Chitkara tells you everything you need to know about the next big enterprise IPO.
Whose tools? Our tools: Slack, Discord and countless other business collaboration tools have been embraced over the last several years because they help far-flung employees connect. Turns out, those tools have also become vehicles for labor organization efforts, as Protocol's Anna Kramer and Lizzy Lawrence report.
Like so many businesses stuck on mainframes and even paper records, financial institutions have decades' worth of legacy technology to overcome when it comes to building global payment systems. Join Protocol's Owen Thomas next Wednesday, Oct. 20 at 10 a.m. PT with Priya Sanger, deputy general counsel and director at Patreon, and Ryan Zagone, head of Americas at Wise for Banks, for a discussion on the challenges and opportunities ahead, as well as the launch of the first Protocol Fintech Power Index. RSVP here.
Some meetings don't really need to be meetings. Kickstart projects with Confluence templates and keep the whole team aligned with real time collaboration features. Meet less but collaborate more. Get started with Confluence for free!
Thanks for reading — see you Monday!
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