Google has hired an executive out of Caesars Entertainment Corp.—the casino company—to spearhead its push into the enterprise, according to a Recode report.
Tariq Shaukat, formerly Caesars’s chief commercial officer, will be president of enterprise sales, according to the report, which includes a confirmation from a Google spokesperson. Shaukat also spent six years at management consultancy McKinsey before joining Caesars (CZR), according to his LinkedIn profile.
Shaukat steps in weeks after Amit Singh, who headed up the Google for Work effort, moved over to the company’s virtual reality effort earlier this month, although Recode reports he will have an expanded portfolio pushing sales of enterprise applications, cloud services, and hardware devices.
As has been reported ad nauseam, Google (GOOG) which derives most of its revenue from Internet searches and advertising, has been trying to break into business software, taking on such established players as Microsoft (MSFT) and, increasingly, Amazon Web Services (AMZN), as well as IBM (IBM), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and others.
It’s been a rocky road thus far but Google’s hiring of Brian Stevens out of Red Hat (RHT) in 2014 and Diane Greene, former chief executive of VMware (VMW), last fall signal that it remains in the hunt.
Google Swears Its Cloud Is Ready for Prime Time
Google’s enterprise-focused products include Chromebooks for Business and Google Apps for Work, which competes with the Microsoft (MSFT) Office juggernaut. And its Google Cloud Platform is taking on public cloud giants Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
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Coins2Day reached out to Google for comment and will update this report as needed.