JPMorgan's Rod Hall Reacts to Google's Cloud Pricing War with Amazon

Google Inc GOOG just escalated its cloud computing pricing war with Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN, slashing its prices by 30 percent. The price cuts are primarily large for small instances, with the Micro instance now costing just $0.006 per hour. High CPU instances will see cost reductions of just 5 percent, while Standard instances will see cuts of 20 percent.

However, JP Morgan's Rod Hall said that the highlight of yesterday's announcement is the launch of Google's preemtible instances, which is meant to directly compete with Amazon Web Services' spot instances. The preemptible instances are jobs that run using idle resources, which can then be suspended if those resources are needed elsewhere.

Hall also noted that there is one clear loser in the Google, Amazon public cloud push - Cisco Systems, Inc. CSCO. Specifically, Hall said that JPMorgan believes "public cloud computing solutions will get increasingly consumable by SMBs, driving further movement away from branded hardware solutions like Cisco."

In the latest quarterly report, Amazon said that AWS generated $1.57 billion in revenue in Q1, more than its four largest competitors combined, according to data from Synergy Research Group. Google's cloud platform revenue grew by 74 percent in Q1, according to the same report.

Year to date, Google has underperformed the market, gaining just 1.1 percent compared with a 7.2 percent increase in the Nasdaq. Amazon has shot higher by 37 percent, while Cisco gained 7 percent.