Google’s aggressive push into cloud computing, where it trailsAmazon.com and Microsoft, has put the internet giant in the lead position to land a marquee client: PayPal.
While Google is the front-runner, according to people familiar with the matter, PayPal is evaluating the other leading providers and hasn’t made any final decisions. PayPal is unlikely to move its technology infrastructure in the fourth quarter, the peak period for online commerce, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential.
Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene,
PayPal would be a top-tier logo for a variety of reasons. It’s a name with broad brand recognition and it’s a Silicon Valley company that operates in the financial services sector. All the big banks are evaluating cloud vendors, and of primary concern is their ability to manage the regulatory burden around data protection.
Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco, said in an interview last week on CNBC that cloud computing is “really kind of reaching these tipping points in large companies, including financial services firms [which] are really starting to embrace cloud computing.”
Additionally, PayPal is a massive technology company built in the pre-cloud era. Within its own data centers, the company processes $10,900 worth of payment volume per second and stores information on 188 million active accounts in over 200 markets.
On the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April, CEO Dan Schulman said, “We run one of the largest private cloud environments in the world.”
PayPal does have some existing business with AWS, namely its Braint
