On 16th November, CEO of Google Cloud, Diane Greene, announced in a blog post that she will be stepping down from her post after 3 years of running the Google Cloud. The position will now be taken up by Thomas Kurian, who worked at Oracle for the past 22 years. Kurian will be joining Google Cloud on November 26th and transitioning into the Google Cloud leadership role in early 2019, while Diane works as a CEO till end of January 2019. Post that, she will continue as a Director on the Alphabet board.
Google Cloud led by Diane Greene
Diane Greene has been leading Google’s cloud computing division since early 2016. She has been considered to be Google’s best bet on being the second largest source of revenue while competing with Amazon and Microsoft in providing computing infrastructure for businesses. However, there are speculations that this decision indicates the said project hasn’t gone as well as planned.
Although the cloud division has seen notable advances under the leadership of Greene, Amazon and Microsoft have stayed a step ahead in their cloud businesses. According to Canalys, Amazon has roughly a third of the global cloud market, which contributes more to revenue than its sales on Amazon.com. Microsoft has roughly half of Amazon’s market share, and currently owns 8 percent of the Global market share of cloud infrastructure services. Maribel Lopez, of Lopez Research states “When Diane Greene came in they had a really solid chance of being the No. 2 provider, Microsoft has really closed the gap and is the No. 2 provider for most enterprise customers by a significant margin.”
Greene acquired customers such as Twitter, Target, and HSBC for Google cloud. Major Fortune 1000 enterprises depend on Google Cloud for their future on. Under her leadership, Google established a training and professional services organization and Google partner organizations. They have come up with ways to help enterprises adopt AI through their Advanced Solutions Lab. Google’s industry verticals has achieved massive traction in health, financial services, retail, gaming and media, energy and manufacturing, and transportation. Along with the Cloud ML and the Cloud IoT groups, they acquired Apigee, Kaggle, qwiklabs and several promising small startups. She oversaw projects like creating custom chips for machine learning, thus gaining traction for artificial intelligence used on the platform.
While the AI- centric approach bought Google in the limelight, Meaghan McGrath, who tracks Google and other cloud providers at Technology Business Research, says that “They’ve been making the right moves and saying the right things, but it just hasn’t shown through in performance financially,” She further stresses on the fact that Google is still hamstrung by a perception that it doesn’t really know how to work with corporate IT departments—an area where Microsoft has made its mark.
Kurian to join Google
Thomas Kurian worked at Oracle for the past 22 years and since 2015 was the president of product development. On September 5th, Kurian told employees in an email on Sept. 5 that he was taking “extended time off from Oracle”. The company said in a statement at the time that “we expect him to return soon.” 23 days later, Oracle put out a filing saying that Kurian had resigned “to pursue other opportunities.”
Google and Oracle did not have a pleasant history together. The two companies are involved in a eight-year legal battle related to Google’s use of the Java programming language, without a license, in developing its Android operating system for smartphones. Oracle owns the intellectual property behind Java. In March, the Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s ruling that had favored Google, sending the case back to the lower court to determine damages that it now must pay Oracle.
CNBC reports that one former Google employee, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, is not optimistic that Kurian will be well received; since Kurian still has to figure out how to work with Googlers.
It would be interesting to see how the face of Google Cloud changes under Kurian’s leadership.
You can head over to Google’s blog to read more about this announcement.
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