First a partner program, now a 'roadshow'
Google is sending its cloud cultists out into the recesses of the real world to preach the gospel of its technology.
The "Cloud Platform Developer Roadshow" was announced by Google on Tuesday as the search company tried to broaden revenues away from its main advertising offerings.
"In the roadshow, we will be talking about new approaches to computing that enable you to move beyond traditional divisions of PaaS and IaaS," wrote product manager Greg DeMichillie in a blog post. "We will also show how we are creating a developer experience that enables you to work more efficiently as you build, test, and deploy your code."
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The roadshow will see Google set up shop in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Helsinki, Paris, Tel Aviv, Manchester, Milan, London, and Berlin during April, and 17 more cities which have not yet been announced.
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This follows Google launching a partner program earlier in March to give trusted partners access to the search kingpin's rarest resources: flesh-and-blood Google employees to help out with sales and marketing.
Now, the company is also spinning-up a worldwide set of roadshows to follow a glossy cloud event in San Francisco that will happen on March 25.
Google is expected to announce new features for its cloud at that event as it tightens competition with Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon, by sheer coincidence, is having its own cloud event in San Francisco on the very next day.
At this event Google is going to reveal new features for its cloud services, which so far have lagged behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of features but have typically beaten them on both price and performance.
This event, paired with the roadshow, is representative of a new strategy at Google to push products that can't merely be given away, and to do that you need one resource that can't be digitized – living people.
Amazon, meanwhile, operates a multitude of summits around the world along with a large event in Las Vegas termed re:invent, and Microsoft helps put on a range of bootcamps around the world. Though the cloud may involve remotely provisioned and managed IT, all the major companies have realized that to get people to part with their cash, you need to send your people out into the world to press some flesh. ®