Amazon and Microsoft may get all the cloud headlines, but don't sleep on Google
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) are the giants of the cloud industry, but Alphabet's Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has made a number of strides in recent years and the company isn't slowing down.
Monness, Crespi, Hardt analyst Brian White, who rates Alphabet a buy with a $3,850 price target, implying nearly 40% upside, noted that Google's recent Data Cloud Summit saw the company unveil a number of new innovations all of which boost the strength of Google Cloud.
White noted that a number of innovations were unveiled at the summit, all of which had the objective to allow âcustomers to work with limitless data, across all workloads, and extend access to everyone.â 
Innovations like BigLake, Spanner change streams, Vertex AI Workbench, Vertex AI Model Registry and Connected Sheets for Looker were all deemed impressive, with White calling them "key," especially BigLake.
White said that BigLake was the most "significant" announcement of the event, as it will expand on Google BigQuery and extend the cloud data warehouse on top of data lakes in a multi-cloud environment. BigQuery competes with the likes of Snowflake (SNOW), AWS's Redshift and Azure's Snynapse, with Google describing it as a âa data lake storage engine, to remove data limits by unifying data lakes and warehouses."
Essentially, it lets companies unify data warehouses and lakes to analyze their data without worrying about a storage format change or system upheaval. 
Another innovation of note was the Spanner change stream, which is expected to launch this quarter, White said. This is Google's relational database that is capable of performing more than 2 billion requests per second at its peak.
White said the new stream has a number of numbers, including having the "freshest data as they can easily replicate changes from Spanner to BigQuery for real-time analytics.â 
White pointed out that Google Cloud has seen "rapid growth" in recent years, most recently growing revenue 45% year-over-year in its most recent to $5.54 billion, with total 2021 revenue at $19.2 billion. According to industry researcher Canalys, Amazon's AWS generated $53.5 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter, account for 33% of the market. Microsoft (MSFT) had an estimated 22%, while Google was well behind them at 9%.Other cloud providers, including IBM (IBM) accounted for 36% of the overall cloud infrastructure market.
On Wednesday, Boeing (BA) tapped Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), as well as Microsoft (MSFT), and (AMZN) for a cloud computing deal that some believe may be worth more than $1 billion.