This is Google Cloud and G Suite

For most of us, cloud storage has revolutionized the way we work, play games, and store data. We use remote storage so casually these days that it’s easy to forget just how many of our favorite apps and platforms use them. Today Google announced that they would be consolidating all of their cloud-based services under the new Google Cloud branding, and their bevy office apps are getting a new umbrella title.

Google broke this news at their Horizon conference, which targets business users. “G Suite” is now a formalized package which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google+, Google Calendar, Google Hangouts, Google Forms.

The announcement was accompanied by a video depicting collaborating workers getting business done to the guitar riffs of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” while a narrator extolls the virtues of G Suite in an oddly Dr. Suess-esque poem.

In addition to encompassing G Suite, Google Cloud also contains a variety of more technical services that focus on working alongside companies to help them achieve cloud-based solutions. It also includes a variety of machine learning tools and API’s, as well as the technologies that Android devices and Chromebooks access the cloud. A blog post outlined the details of this restructuring:

Google Cloud isn’t only the products, it is also how we work alongside companies, in an engineering-centric way. Digital transformation and moving to the cloud are technical processes, we have customer engineers, customer reliability engineers, site reliability engineers, product engineers, all there to partner with our customers as they migrate, deploy and evolve. Our approach and our commitment to Google Cloud customers is simple: We’re in it together.

In essence, most of the services that we’re discussing have already been in existence, but Google is restructuring how they are categorized so it’s easier to discuss them. The search giant also announced that they had opened up eight new data centers in Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt. The company predicts that they will be opening up a new data center about once every month going forward to accommodate the growth of Google Cloud services.