Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene is stepping down. Former Oracle President Thomas Kurian will succeed her, Greene confirmed today. The transition is expected in early 2019.
Kurian resigned from Oracle earlier this year after taking a mysterious leave from the enterprise technology company just before Oracle OpenWorld 2018. Kurian has serious enterprise expertise and apparently disagreed with Oracle's direction in the cloud market. While Oracle Founder Larry Ellison wanted to continue competing on all fronts, Kurian apparently favored promoting Oracle's SaaS applications on third-party clouds -- especially since Oracle's own IaaS business is a market laggard.
Greene has led Google Cloud for the past three years. Google Cloud certainly is growing, but the company has not disclosed cloud revenue figures in recent months. Moreover, Google has MSP relationships -- but AWS and Azure typically dominate the ChannelE2E Top 100 Public Cloud MSP list.
Google Cloud: Playing Catch-up
The pending Google Cloud CEO change comes at a key time in the cloud ecosystem. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to host its annual AWS re:Invent conference later this month. Both AWS and Microsoft Azure are pulling away from the overall market in terms of revenue.
Meanwhile, IBM is striving to accelerate its own cloud revenues by acquiring Red Hat. On the one hand, Red Hat is not a cloud giant. But on the other hand, the Linux company's open source software runs both on-premises and across third-party clouds, making it an attractive subscription service business to IBM.
