admin Google will spend even more in sales for its cloud business, told its new chief, former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian.
“You will see us accelerate the growth even faster than we have to date,” Kurian stated at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. Earlier, he informed, Google nearly quadrupled its sales and distribution functions.
“We are hiring some of the best talent from around the industry to grow our sales organization, and you will see us competing much more aggressively as we go forward,” added Kurian, who in September left Oracle as its president of product development and in November was named as the new Google Cloud CEO to replace Diane Greene.
At Oracle Kurian was in charge of a 35,000-person team focused on software development across 32 countries, as per his LinkedIn profile. Now he’s in charge of Google’s complete cloud business, including the Google Cloud Platform public cloud and the G Suite productivity apps for business.
At the conference, Kurian emphasized several products and pointed to several Google cloud customers using those products, including BNP Paribas, the city of Los Angeles, Home Depot, KeyBank and Telegraph Media Group.
Now the company will concentrate more on individual industries like financial services and work more with channel partners, Kurian added. The company is also introducing a Cloud for Life program to keep existing customers and bring in new ones.
“I talked to some of largest companies and said, ‘Why did you choose Google?’ And uniformly, the feedback I got is, ‘By far the best technology in the market, the technology is amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it.’ This is what I heard over and over again,” Kurian further said.
“In terms of growth, cloud does continue to deliver sizable revenue growth, driven by GCP; and GCP does remain one of the fastest growing businesses across Alphabet,” Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, stated on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We’ve doubled the number of GCP contracts greater than $1 million. We’re also seeing early nice uptick in the number of deals that are greater than $100 million and really pleased with the success and penetration there.”
But unlike market leader Amazon, Google hasn’t specified exactly how much revenue it gets each quarter — just that it gets more than $1 billion per quarter, between the public cloud and the cloud apps, combined. Amazon’s cloud revenue was $7.43 billion last quarter, the company recorded.
In a question-and-answer session, one person asked for a financial update, and Kurian declined to explore. He told that Porat and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will disclose more “if they choose to.”
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