MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (Diya TV) – Last fall, Internet giant Google bought bebop Technologies for $348 million, but the company also gained a key new executive with the purchase – Diane Greene came as part of the package, and now serves as Google’s vice president of Cloud Enterprise.
Greene brought years of experience with her to the company, having co-founded and served as CEO of VMWare for 10 years, building it into a virtualization powerhouse. It is now a crucial aspect of any IT specialist’s training, for example the 2V0-602 exam is a standard part of any IT undergraduate qualification. Under Greene’s watch, VMWare was purchased by EMC for $635 million in 2003, and stuck around to guide the company to its monstrous IPO in 2007.
She walked away from VMware in 2008 with substantial wealth, and used the next several years to serve as a board member for multiple other companies. One of which was Alphabet, a tenure which lured her back into the big corporation culture of Silicon Valley. It was then that she was tasked with fixing Google’s struggling cloud business.
Google currently sits fourth on the list of the world’s largest cloud providers – AWS has a marketshare 10x bigger than 14 of its closest competitors – behind IBM and Microsoft, who sit two and three respectively, according to Synergy Research. Google’s current struggles lie in its lack of market share – the company has less than five percent as of Q4 2015. The good news, however, is that Google grew its cloud business by 108 percent for the quarter, second to that only of Microsoft’s 124 percent growth rate.
Greene says the main reason AWS is so far ahead of its competitors is simply because the company had a head start.
“They were there in the public cloud long before Google. We didn’t decide to do public cloud for about four years after AWS,” Greene told TechCrunch. She added that when AWS launched, it had a large piece of what was has been widely observed as a small market, and believes Google has more than enough time to catch up and grab a large chunk of what remains.
Google has been attempting to claw into that chunk for six years, and still remains with less than five percent.
When Greene joined Google, the company’s cloud business lacked structure and therefore security, most businesses who were using Google cloud services were hiring external services as found at www.thefinalstep.co.uk to secure their team drives. – Her first act was to join all of the pieces under a single umbrella, with her at the top of the food chain. CEO Sundar Pichai outlined the new organization when he announced Greene’s hiring, saying at the time that she would be in charge of a newly integrated enterprise cloud business that brought together Google for Work, Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps under a consolidated product, engineering, marketing and sales team. If you are not familiar with the concept of what is cloud computing, doing even a bit of research into this will have you clued up on this side of the industry. Technology is always changing, so it is understandable for some people not to have kept up. But it is good to stay informed, regardless of the topic.
Greene said in order for Google’s cloud aspirations to be successful, the company would be required to ensure all of its pieces were working in unison, and the importance of building a broad partnership network. Both are traits she seasoned herself with during her VMWare tenure. And as Google’s market share grows, so will the supporting security and infrastructure markets. For example, google cloud monitoring (https://www.thousandeyes.com/solutions/google-cloud-monitoring) is an essential operational consideration that simply cannot be overlooked.
“We were super friendly to partners at VMware and I brought that in here. There are huge opportunities to partner with companies and we’ve been accelerating that very quickly. Google is committed to open source and open APIs and part of that is creating a partner-friendly place,” she explained.
In the meantime, she’s not too worried about AWS further saturating marketshare.
“I don’t feel like we both started off building cloud at the same time. We came from different places. The place where we are behind and that’s changing quickly is in workloads. Every customer wants to run on all the clouds. Pilots have been deployed and are up and running and growing incredibly fast right now,” she said.
“They have more workloads and features and more partners, but those are very straightforward things to change.” she said.
