In November last year, Google hired ex-Oracle executive Thomas Kurian to lead its cloud business, and the global giant has set some ambitious plans for its cloud business since then. The cloud division which deals with computing services, online data storage and productivity software has ambitiously set a plan to generate more than $1 billion in quarterly revenue, which it had received in the last quarter.
The cloud division was earlier led by Diana Greene under whose leadership, the company bowed out from bidding for a $10 billion military cloud computing contract, citing its lack of certifications to handle sensitive data. This was a major blow as it set the company lagging behind its competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft. With Kurian’s onboarding, the company is serious about scaling up its enterprise business across the globe, including India.
Google Is Investing More In Its Cloud Business
For Alphabet, the cloud has been able to deliver sizable growth with GCP being one of the fastest growing business. “We’ve doubled the number of GCP contracts greater than $1 million. We’re also seeing an early nice uptick in the number of deals that are greater than $100 million and really pleased with the success and penetration there,” Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, was quoted as saying. But unlike market leader Amazon, Google hasn’t specified exactly how much revenue it gets each quarter and Google Cloud still lags behind the cloud market leaders
While Greene was heavily focused on making Google’s ML capabilities and engineering breakthroughs available to customers as a key differentiator, Kurian might tread a different route. Since 2015, when Greene was brought on board, she has done some interesting work in the escalating cloud business. With Kurian’s leadership, the company plans to invest more in sales for its cloud business, and accelerate faster than they have had till date. To achieve this he plans to invest in hiring some of the best talents from around the industry to grow sales organisation.
Kurian has been instrumental in leading the 35,000-person team at Oracle and software development across 32 countries. He aims to bring the same experience at the Google cloud, where is aiming to focus on individual industries such as financial services. Reports suggest that he has also introduced a ‘Cloud For Life’ program to keep existing customers and bring more new customers.
What Steps Has He Taken Till Now?
Acquisition of Alooma under Kurian’s leadership: Acquisitions are one of the best ways to grow and Google Cloud announced recently that it would acquire the Israeli startup Alooma. This is the first acquisition plan since Kurian took over as the cloud head. Alooma is an enterprise data pipeline platform helping customers migrate to the cloud.
With this acquisition, they also plan to attract more enterprise customers, helping them move into the cloud, give them access to the database, analytics, security and AI services. Alooma has already been a partner of Google Cloud with integrations for Google Ads, Google Analytics, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.
Google releases a beta of the hybrid cloud platform to customers: Another step by the company was the release beta of its hybrid cloud platform to customers that has come as a major step for the whole growth strategy. This is an attractive proposition for customers who do not want to move all their data into the public cloud, giving them more customers. It is built on top of Kubernetes and Istio. It makes installation easy drawing more users.
Google Cloud Growth In India
Google launched the first cloud data centres in India in 2017 across three data centres in Mumbai, housing separate cloud availability zone. The public cloud services market in India has been speculated to be doing a good business with the company expecting it to triple year on year in the coming years. The data centre is already seeing a huge spike in its customer base.
To further boost cloud business in India, Google has roped in Amitabh Jacob to head India Partnerships and Alliances, where he will be responsible for driving Google Cloud’s route-to-market strategy through partnerships with system integrators, resellers, technology partners, managed services providers and distribution partners in India, according to reports.
Bringing experience from AWS and Microsoft, he has been instrumental in building and scaling cloud partnerships for the India region. Google sees India has a key growth for Google Cloud and aligning with Kurian’s growth plan, Jacob will be responsible for building adequate channel capacity and competency, driving success through Google Cloud’s partnership model, and deepening the reach of Google Cloud products and solutions in the Indian market.
Since launching the Google Cloud Region in Mumbai in 2017, the company is already differentiating itself with its security, network architecture, open source software and AI, and further wants to grow the business in the next few years.
