Google Cloud is laying off a "small number of employees" -- though the search giant is working with affected employees to potentially find them new positions within the company, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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Despite the cuts, the overall Google Cloud Platform (GCP) business appears strong, and growth is accelerating. For its Q4 2019, Google cloud revenue was $2.6 billion, up 53 percent from Q4 2018. For fiscal 2019, cloud revenues were $8.9 billion, up 52.7 percent from 2018.
Moreover, Google Cloud has caught on on with key partners -- including ISVs and MSPs. The Top 200 Public Cloud MSPs list now features dozens of Google-focused partners.
Still, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Office 365 represent far larger cloud businesses overall. Amid that reality, Google has to carefully choose where it competes in the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS market segments. That realization may have triggered some of the recent staff cuts, ChannelE2E believes.
Google Cloud Platform: Hires and Milestones
Despite the recent cuts, Google Cloud has made multiple strategic hires over the past year or so. Key hires and milestones include:
- November 2019: Hiring Cisco Systems channel veteran Nirav Sheth.
- April 2019: Rallying customers and partners with new offerings during the Google Cloud Next 2019 conference.
- April 2019: Hiring SAP veteran Robert Enslin to succeed Paul-Henri Ferrand as president of Global Customer Operations for Cloud.
- March 2019: Hiring Oracle veteran Amit Zavery as VP of engineering.
- November 2018: Announcing the Google Cloud CEO leadership transition from Diane Greene to Thomas Kurian, an Oracle veteran, effective in early 2019.
So what's next? Answers will likely surface during the Google Cloud Next 2020 conference, which is scheduled for April 6-8 in San Francisco.
