Google challenges Amazon with new price cuts for cloud tools

Google Inc. unveiled price cuts for its cloud-based computing services, as the company seeks to attract business customers from Amazon.com Inc. and other rivals.

The Mountain View, California-based company is reducing the cost of some features, including some storage, database and networking options, by 23 percent to 79 percent, it said today at Google Cloud Platform Live, a conference for developers in San Francisco.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft Corp. have been lowering prices for Web-based services this year as they compete for customers in a market that was worth more than $45 billion last year, according to researcher IDC.

Google last month said it was cutting prices by about 10 percent on some of its cloud products. The reductions were driven by declining hardware costs and greater efficiency at the search provider's data centers, the company said.

"We're going to do everything we can to unburden you," Brian Stevens, Google vice president of product management, said at the event. "We'll continue to drive greater efficiencies and pass that cost savings on to you."

Google also unveiled updates to other parts of its lineup, including new networking options for quickly accessing its cloud and a new service that uses a technology called containers, which give developers more flexibility as they build and ship applications.

This is the company's third major cloud-services conference this year, underscoring the investment Google is making in the market. Last month, Google acquired Firebase Inc., a provider of software tools, to help build a better platform for developing mobile applications.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pui-Wing Tam at ptam13bloomberg.net Jillian Ward, John Lear