Indian-American Thomas Kurian, who used to head product development as President at Oracle has been chosen as the person to head Google’s Cloud division from early next year.
The current CEO of Google Cloud Diane Greene will ensure that the business sees a smooth handover for the incoming person, working with Kurian to bring him up to speed with how the business functions. She will remain a director on the board of Alphabet, Google's parent company, the statement confirmed.
Hailing from Bengaluru, Kurian who worked at Oracle for 22 years reportedly quit over disagreements with Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison over the future course of the company as the Cloud business gets highly competitive.
According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, under Greene's leadership, Cloud has become an incredible business built on Google's decades of investment in infrastructure, data security, and AI.
We’re really excited to welcome Thomas whose product vision, customer focus, and deep expertise will be a huge asset to our growing Cloud business.Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google
Under Greene's leadership, Google Cloud has moved from having only two significant customers and a collection of startups to having major Fortune 1,000 enterprises betting their future on Google Cloud.
"We've built a strong business together – set up by integrating sales, marketing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Google Apps/G Suite into what is now called Google Cloud," she noted.
Kurian stepped down from Oracle in September.
A member of Oracle's Executive Committee for 13 Years, he led 35,000-people software development team in 32 countries with an R&D budget of $4 billion.
Industry experts Kurian helped in the transformation of Oracle's products with introduction of leading suite of Cloud Services, led 60 software acquisitions and Oracle's 45 Cloud data centres.
Cloud is an ever-growing business, and Google clearly sees that having a pro at the helm will help its ambitions, especially in a market like India, where the internet proliferation and access to enterprise business, as well as consumers is slowly moving to the cloud.
Amazon and Microsoft are strong in the segment, but Kurian faces some tough challenges while looking to grow the business. According to this CNBC report, Amazon leads the cloud market with over 34 percent share, followed by Microsoft with 15 percent and Google is a distant fourth in the list, behind IBM as well.
It’s clear that Kurian has been brought on board to move it up the ladder and give its business division a revenue boost.
(With IANS inputs)
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