Transitioning Google Cloud after three great years

Hello All,

When I joined Google full-time to run Cloud in December 2015, I told my family and friends that it would be for two years. Now, after an unbelievably stimulating and productive three years, it’s time to turn to the passions I’ve long had around mentoring and education.

The mentoring will include investing in and helping female founder CEOs who have engineering or science backgrounds. I want to encourage every woman engineer and scientist to think in terms of building their own company someday. The world will be a better place with more female founder CEOs.

The work in education will especially be initiatives that combine technology with in-person teaching to make high-quality education that is low-cost, scalable and personalized. When bebop was purchased by Google, I committed all of my proceeds to philanthropy, it is high time to put that money to work!

Thomas Kurian, a respected technologist and executive, will be joining Google Cloud on November 26th and transitioning into the Google Cloud leadership role in early 2019. Sundar, Urs and I all interviewed Thomas, and I believe that he’ll do an amazing job helping to take Google Cloud to the next level.Thomas has 22 years of experience at Oracle; most recently he was President of Product Development.

I will continue as CEO through January, working with Thomas to ensure a smooth transition. I will remain a Director on the Alphabet board.

The Google Cloud team has accomplished amazing things over the last three years, and I’m proud to have been a part of this transformative work. We have moved Google Cloud from having only two significant customers and a collection of startups to having major Fortune 1000 enterprises betting their future on Google Cloud, something we should accept as a great compliment as well as a huge responsibility.  

We’ve built a strong business together—set up by integrating sales, marketing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Google Apps/G Suite into what is now called Google Cloud.

We established a training and professional services organization and partnering organizations. We revamped customer engineering and added a team of experts in the Office of the CTO. We also pioneered a way to help enterprises adopt AI through our Advanced Solutions Lab. We built out a full marketing organization that in just three years has received many recognitions including Cannes Lions awards. We set up our industry verticals org where we have achieved massive traction in health, financial services, retail, gaming and media, energy and manufacturing, and transportation. We set up the Cloud ML and the Cloud IoT groups. We acquired Apigee, Kaggle, qwiklabs and several great small startups. Our technology development has been recognized throughout the industry, and Google Cloud is differentiated in security, AI, open hybrid application modernization, G Suite, and many other areas. We are now recognized as a leader in 11 Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves.

But here’s what I'm most proud of: the phenomenal team assembled and how we together have built out all of our functions for customer-facing enterprise readiness and engineering enterprise execution. When this journey started, some people would say that Google had great technology but they weren’t sure that customers would rely on Google as their enterprise partner. At our recent Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, we had over 23,000 attendees, representing 10x growth from 2016.  With nearly 300 customers speaking about how Google Cloud is helping to transform their businesses, no one was questioning our seriousness or our abilities.

The cloud space is early and there is an enormous opportunity ahead. I have loved working with everyone. I am especially grateful to all of our customers, partners, and employees for an amazing three years of getting to work with you.

—Diane

Sundar and Thomas wanted to add these statements on today’s announcement:

Sundar

“In a few short years, under Diane’s leadership, Cloud has become an incredible business built on Google’s decades of investment in infrastructure, data security, and AI. Today, those investments are available to everyone and truly changing the way people work. I have deep appreciation for everything Diane has done and I’m super happy that we’ll continue to benefit from her wisdom as she continues serving on our Board of Directors. We’re really excited to welcome Thomas whose product vision, customer focus, and deep expertise will be a huge asset to our growing Cloud business.”

Thomas

"I'm excited to join the fantastic Google Cloud team at this important and promising time. I'm looking forward to building on the success of recent years as it enters its next phase of growth."