The enterprise turnaround of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

Redefining the meaning of ‘Googly’

Thomas Kurian’s 22 years of experience at Oracle may be what Google Cloud needs.

Kurian, who last served as Oracle’s product development president, probably didn’t fit Googler’s profile when he became CEO of Google Cloud, the No. 3 cloud providers, in 2019. But its top-to-bottom overhaul of Alphabet’s cloud division brought it discipline and focus, and it ended up with some indispensable business credo.

• Kurian set Google Cloud’s open hybrid and multicloud focus on infrastructure, data analytics, cybersecurity, collaboration and communications and industry -specific products and services.

• Major corporations including Deutsche Bank, Ford Motor Company, Mayo Clinic, Univision and the U.S. Air Force have signed in as Google Cloud customers since Kurian boarded.
• That customer purchase is the best validation of Google Cloud’s newly found business readiness, Kurian told me in a recent interview.
• “Really, we’ve really changed, and most of our biggest customers have been super successful in using and using the cloud through the work they’ve done with us,” he said.

Most aspects of Kurian’s reshape Google Cloud were touched upon of business.

• He brought in new senior leadership, tripled the salesforce, sharpened product focus, put in place new systems to manage enterprise customers and expanded Google Cloud’s global footprint.
• “We need to develop a lot of functions that didn’t really exist before – whether that was a commercial legal team to negotiate contracts, a sales organization, customer service, etc.,” Kurian said.
• Kurian also discussed the difficult issue of Google Cloud engineering culture. “We need to add to this this customer focus and make much of our innovation customer -driven,” he said.

Work pays off for Google Cloud, that annual revenue-which includes GCP and Google Workspace-will climb approximately 230% under Kurian to $ 19.2 billion in 2021.

• “We’re definitely looking at GCP as a business -ready marketplace in the cloud, or we’re never in the process of moving our workloads,” said Keith Silvestri, chief technology officer at KeyBank. “From a maturity perspective, from production support, from the investments they make in security, through how they’re organized, completely.”
• While Google Cloud continues to run at a loss – $ 931 million at the end of March – parent company Alphabet said it is taking a long -term view of its cloud business.
• The biggest challenge of Google Cloud today is expanding globally, according to Kurian.
• “We want to expand into more countries, into more industries, and a lot of work is going on to expand both our data center footprint around the world, as well as our sales, distribution and service organizations around the world,” he said. niya.

Read our full report on Kurian’s turnaround in Google Cloud here.

– Donna Goodison (email | kaba)

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM SAP

The competitive edge of digital solutions

For the past 50 years, SAP has worked closely with our customers to solve some of the world’s most complex problems. We have also seen, and have been part of, the rapid acceleration of technology in response. In various industries, several specific pathways have emerged to help businesses manage the unexpected challenges of the past few years.

Click here to read more from SAP

Tracking cyber-spies

The revelation this week that Russia has stepped up its cyber-espionage against governments supporting Ukraine is a big deal-not only because of the threat it points to, but also because of who revealed it.

Microsoft released a report on Wednesday saying it had tracked 128 Russian network intrusions in total since the invasion of Ukraine – mainly against government agencies (49%) but also including IT enterprises (20%), critical infrastructure organizations (19%) and NGOs (12%). The U.S. has been the biggest target of Russia’s espionage efforts, but 42 countries in all have been targeted, according to the company.

The disclosure is a reminder that while Russia’s headline cyber-retaliation revenge has yet to show, that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. Microsoft said that 29% of the Russian attacks it tracks were successful, and in a quarter of those violations, Russia was able to exfiltrate the data.

The report also highlights Microsoft’s unique role – a cybersecurity powerhouse with a view to customers around the world – for itself, said Justin Fier, vice president of Tactical Risk and Response at Darktrace.

“We already have large private sector organizations that issue intel, or spy claims, that usually come from the U.S. government itself,” Fier said. If such information comes out at all: “Espionage is usually not something you discuss in the open,” he said.

But while defenders seek to weigh the level of cyberthreat from Russia, such information is a key asset, Fier said. Microsoft has data that “probably some governments don’t have access to,” he said. “It’s up to them to do that.”

– Kyle Alspach (email | kaba)

Around the enterprise

Intel said it would delay the ground-breaking ceremony for its Ohio chipmaking campus because Congress has yet to pass the $ 52 billion Chips Act, a fairly transparent and ridiculously unrealistic threat to take its ball and go home.

The Broadcom-VMware deal may not end until next year – if at all – now that European regulators are planning to conduct a more extensive investigation than expected, according to the Financial Times.

Chinese chip designers might consider forking the RISC-V open-source standard to cope with any future penalties on chip -making equipment and technology.

AWS announces CodeWhisperer, an AI -powered code writing tool which is very similar to GitHub Copilot, which became publicly available this week.

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM SAP

The competitive edge of digital solutions

When companies invest in maintaining their “green ledger” with the same commitment they have in their financial ledgers, they will be able to connect their environmental, social, and financial data across so they can guide their business toward sustainability. . At the end of the day, what is measured, can be managed.

Click here to read more from SAP