Critics often say that the Google Cloud Platform is great technology, but Google, the company, lacks the will or ability to sell these computing, storage and networking services to large businesses. That’s a contention that Diane Greene, the senior vice president in charge of company’s cloud effort, contests all the time, as she did again on Monday.
Reminding Coins2Day Brainstorm Tech attendees that cloud computing adoption is in its very early stages, she estimates that 5% to 10% of corporate workloads are now operating on a public cloud like Amazon (AMZN)Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT)Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. That leaves a huge chunk of what she says is an overall $1.2 trillion IT market.
To attack that massive opportunity, Google just set up an organization to take on key vertical markets in healthcare, financial services, retail, and media, she said.
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Greene, who was on the Google board before taking on this role last fall, said she took the senior vice president job because she thought that Google can help big companies. “I believed and we see it proven now where we go into an RFP, we can actually win an RFP pretty much every time against AWS or Azure,” she said without naming any new customers. RFP stands for request for proposal, basically a fairly standard bidding process that suppliers often go through to win corporate business.
Since joining Google (GOOG), Greene has been working to get product roadmaps to customers, getting the right customer facing organization set up, and bringing on strong enterprise people to run sales and marketing.
Greene also disputed the widely held notion that Google is a search and advertising company, calling it a highly competitive technology company that offers an array of software services including Google Apps and internal search capabilities that are applicable to Coins2Day 500 companies.
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“What we’re doing in Chromebooks and Android for the enterprise—even with [Google] Glass in hands-free manufacturing—are things we can bring to bear to the enterprise and that’s pretty valuable,” she said.
It also helps that the enterprise of today is not like the enterprise of five or ten years ago. “It used to be you wouldn’t get fired for going slowly but now they have to move,” she said. “It’s Google’s time for the enterprise.”