Interview with Thomas Kurian

Thomas Kurian, who took over the growing activity of Google's cloud computing last year, is not afraid that regulators will hinder his ability to grow, even as the Justice Department investigates the parent company as a result of possible anti-competitive behavior.

"These are different businesses," Kurian told CNBC's Josh Lipton during an interview this week. "There is an activity in the consumer space.There is an activity in the business space. [is] really in the space of the company ".

Google's ad revenue grew 16% in the second quarter to $ 32.6 billion, or about 84% of total Alphabet sales. In digital advertising, Google occupies a dominant position. The research firm eMarketer estimates that it controlled more than 38% of the market in 2018, which makes it by far the main player.

However, in the public cloud, where large technology companies provide an infrastructure that allows customers to offload their IT and storage needs, Google is far behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The cloud sector, which includes Google's cloud-based hosting and G Suite productivity applications portfolio, generates an annualized turnover of more than $ 8 billion, compared to $ 4 billion less than two years ago. The latest Gartner data shows that Google controls 4% of the public cloud market and 10% of the office suite market.

Regulators are clearly more concerned about the growth of advertising in Google, where the company can use its proprietary rights on the Android operating system, the Chrome browser and the dominant search engine to collect large amounts of consumer data and control what users see. Last week, Alphabet confirmed that the DOJ was investigating. And on Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that 50 Attorneys General had participated in a Google investigation of potential antitrust violations.

To date, Kurian's biggest deal has been the acquisition of the $ 2.6-billion Looker Data Analysis Company in June.

Kurian, a longtime Oracle executive who has replaced former VMware director, Diane Greene, at the helm of Google 's cloud, has been interviewing CNBC specifically to discuss the issues. a partnership with the Mayo Clinic. On Tuesday, Google announced that the nonprofit medical center with facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota had chosen Google as the leading public cloud provider under a 10-year contract. The terms have not been disclosed.

Kurian said that although Amazon and Microsoft are "good companies", Google has some advantages, such as artificial intelligence and data analysis. His job is to set up a sales organization that can support large companies while attracting key customers who could help promote the technology.

"We have the best platform for analysis and information management in the world," said Kurian. "We have material advantages in the way that artificial intelligence algorithms can be built from data."

Cris Ross, head of information at Mayo Clinic, said that he was impressed by Google's efforts to add industry-specific cloud computing tools for analysis of the data, although it has "at least a small footprint with other cloud providers."

Before Google's arrival at Google, the company had been the subject of internal controversy over some of its work with the US government. Last year, Google employees demonstrated against the partnership between the Pentagon and Project Maven, which aimed to develop AI surveillance tools to analyze drone images. In June, the company announced to its employees that it would not renew this contract and that Google then abandoned the competition for a different contract with the Pentagon, worth $ 10 billion, which could come into conflict with the values ​​of society.

More recently, Google has decided to stop working with the government. Peter Thiel, an investor and board member of Facebook, and Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir, criticized the company for acting against the interests of the United States.

Kurian defended Google, claiming he had major contracts with the state of Arizona, the city of Memphis, Tennessee, and a cyber defense project with the city of New York.

"We have tripled our public sector sales force this year, for example, because of the demand from our public sector clients," Kurian said. "We are very committed to working with the US government, and we have many, many projects and many people at Google working with them."

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