Google turns to former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian to advance cloud computing business – TechCrunch



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Diane Greene announced Friday its resignation after three years running Google's cloud trading. She will remain until the beginning of the year to help her successor, Thomas Kurian, in the transition. After more than 20 years in the service of the company, he left Oracle at the end of September. He is responsible for making Google's cloud division more business-friendly, a goal that has strangely escaped the company.

Greene was hired in 2015 to bring some order and knowledge of the company to the company's cloud sector. While it has helped them move in this direction and develop cloud commerce, it just has not been enough. Greene's time has come to an end for months.

The torch is passed to Kurian, a man who spent more than two decades in a company that could be the opposite of Google. He led the product at Oracle, a traditional software company. Oracle itself has been struggling to make the transition to a cloud company, but Bloomberg reported in September that one of the reasons Kurian was taking a leave was a difference of opinion with President Larry Ellison on the cloud strategy. According to the report, Kurian wanted to make the Oracle software available on public clouds such as AWS and Azure (and Google Cloud). Ellison apparently did not agree and a few weeks later, Kurian announced his departure.

Even though Kurian's background does not seem to be perfectly aligned with Google's, it's important to keep in mind that his thinking is evolving. He was also responsible for thousands of products and helped promote the move from Oracle to Oracle. He has had a successful product development experience that companies wanted, and that may be the kind of knowledge Google was looking for in his next cloud leader.

According to Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst of Constellation Research, Google still has to learn how to support the company and believes that Kurian is the right person to help the company achieve this. "Kurian knows what is needed for a cloud computing company to work for businesses," Wang said.

S & he is right, an old school business executive may be what Google needs to turn its cloud division into a business-friendly hub. Greene has always claimed that it was still early for the cloud and that Google had ample time to capture some of the untapped market, a point she reiterated in her blog Friday. "The cloud space is early and there is a huge opportunity ahead," she writes.

She may be right about it, but the positions on market share seem to be getting tougher. AWS, which was first in the market, has a huge lead in the market with over 30% of most accounts. Microsoft is the only company that has the market power at the moment and makes the most of it, and the only other company with a double-digit market share. In fact, Amazon has a larger market share than the combined combined companies, according to data from Synergy Research.

While Google is still mentioned in the 3 major cloud computing companies with AWS and Microsoft, with a business turnover of about $ 4 billion a year, it still has a long way to go to reach the level of these other companies. Despite Greene's assertions, time is running out. Kurian may be the one who pushed the company to capture some of this untapped market as companies move more and more workloads into the cloud. At this point, Google is counting on him to do exactly that.

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