Google sees big data and collaboration as key to enterprise growth

In the 14 years since Google was formed it has become a market leader in many areas such as search - still its bread-and-butter core business - and mobile, with Android now found in three out of every four smartphones sold according to recent research.

It's also pushed into email, with Gmail a hugely popular tool, and the social world with Google+. And while all of these developments can appear to be consumer-orientated, they have all played a key part in the firm's continued push into the enterprise IT landscape.

Now, in an exclusive with V3, Google's head of enterprise for the UK Thomas Davies has given more insights on the firm's plans to grow its presence in the enterprise market, as it continues rival IT veterans such as Microsoft, IBM and HP.

One area Davies was keen tout is it plans to ramp up the push of its big data offering Big Query.

This was actually announced as far back as 2010 but, to date, Google has been surprisingly quiet about its capabilities and updates have been minimal.

The platform offers firms the chance to query billions of rows of data, if stored on Google's infrastructure, in a similar manner to the likes of SAP with its Hana application. But Davies said Google's Big Query service offers more benefits by letting firms use Google's software APIs to analyse the data.

"The APIs we offer are the same ones we were using to run our own business, such as Prediction or Translation that we've refined over the last five to 10 years. We're now licensing that and that's something no-one else can offer, it's a huge differentiator," he said.

"This means our technology stack is unique and not just another ‘me too' offering running on Azure. We build it all ourselves, even down to the servers."

While Google hasn't made too much noise about Big Query beyond the occasional blog post, Davies hinted to V3 that the firm has some sizeable announcement around the platform to be made in the near future, although he was coy on specifics when pressed.