Google's Diane Greene: Here's why enterprises want our cloud

Google's new senior VP outlines her plans to grow the company's enterprise cloud business -- and what she sees as the top good thing about Google's cloud

Last November, Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for technical infrastructure, suggested that the company’s cloud revenue may surpass its advertising revenue in 5 years. Considering that Google’s parent Alphabet is the largest company within the world thanks almost entirely to go looking ad bucks and Google’s cloud remains way behind Amazon's, Hölzle’s prediction seemed optimistic at best.

Hölzle, as it seems, was instrumental in recruiting Diane Greene as senior vice president of enterprise business at Google late last year. The general reaction to it hire has mostly been: Well, if anyone can grow Google’s enterprise cloud business exponentially, Diane Greene will.

As founder and CEO of VMware, Greene was in the main accountable for one in every of the foremost beautiful triumphs ever in enterprise tech: the speedy adoption of server virtualization. In the early 2000s, enterprises embraced new technology at a glacial pace, but VMware was ready to cutoff that cycle and establish a brand new foundational layer for the information center in record time.
diane greene

Google

VMware co-founder Diane Greene is currently heading up Google's cloud. Job number one: Sell it to enterprises.

Yet the challenges of attracting enterprises to the public cloud area unit additional formidable -- by Greene’s own estimate, enterprise workloads account for only five to ten % of current public cloud usage. In an interview with Henry Graham Greene last week at Google I/O, I asked her how she planned to grow Google’s enterprise cloud business and what distinctive offerings would differentiate Google Cloud from Amazon net Services, Microsoft Azure, and the rest. The following is an emended version of the interview.

InfoWorld: At VMware you were incredibly effective at obtaining enterprises to adopt a spic-and-span technology: server virtualization. How were you ready to try this with one thing thus elementary to enterprise infrastructure in such a brief time?

Greene: And running their mission-critical workloads.

InfoWorld: Exactly.

Greene: Basically, I always say it was a nondisruptive riotous technology, so some of the items we have a tendency to did at VMware concerned building tools to facilitate it. We had a tool, a P-to-V tool, that will suck a physical machine into our virtual machine that would just run. And we had a tool that will withdraw on the network, look for all of your workloads, see how a lot of the machine was used to spot smart candidate workloads, and let people see what the price savings would be. It was those tools -- and that i think it had been extremely about to the system directors terribly early through the desktop and obtaining them snug with it.

InfoWorld: What were the lessons you learned from that success?

Greene: In terms of lessons, it’s how straightforward is it for somebody to maneuver. You have to possess the benefits, but you conjointly got to create it straightforward. And then: What are the early adoption areas, where the right evangelist can get terribly snug and need to bring the remainder on board? All those forms of things.

InfoWorld: Fast-forwarding to now, in your new position as head of Google’s enterprise cloud, what are some of the challenges and inhibitors you face? does one assume we’re reaching a tipping purpose with the general public cloud?

Greene: The biggest change that’s obtaining everyone to maneuver is, all of a sudden: "Wait a minute, I can’t secure my data center. Google Cloud is actually safer than my information center ..." We have 600 security engineers. They can’t keep up thereupon regardless of how massive an organization they're.

And do I really wish to stay developing ways in which to manage containers or virtual machines and manage all that once I may hand that off? i need to be ready to keep taking advantage of the newest thanks to get insights into my information and also the ways in which to automatize streaming my information in and managing it. Do I really wish to in person try this with my very own people?

A company’s core advantage is in the applications it builds. They were having to build the complete thing so they may move quick and profit of recent technology, but currently there’s a method to require advantage of recent technology and move quick whereas partnering with Google Cloud. But it is a partnership. That’s one thing I’ve completed. You can’t say to someone: "OK, you’re moving to the cloud now. Here’s a bunch of APIs. Good luck." It’s a lifelong partnership.

InfoWorld: That’s a very smart purpose. It seems to ME there’s a bit of a cultural disconnect between Google which type of relationship with enterprise. Google is seen in some ways as its own insular world. You can return and use our stuff if you prefer, but …

Greene: [laughs] We’ll do you that favor.

InfoWorld: Yeah. The whole relationship thing is thus essential on the enterprise aspect. You established that with VMware. How will that translate?

Greene: VMware hired {very smart|excellent|superb} engineers; Google hires terribly good engineers. Our engineers [at VMware] loved extremely processing the socks off our customers, really delivering price to them. We beloved it that our customers beloved United States of America. It was really plenty of fun.

Here at Google, everybody is obtaining excited regarding it. Before we did a public cloud, the customers were Googlers, because they run seven billion-plus active user apps. That’s who the company needed to create happy. Now we have a tendency to have this chance to create the complete world happy, so it’s not exhausting to bring that to associate engineering org, because at the finish of the day, everybody desires to add price to the globe.

Suddenly, we will reach each enterprise with the technology. Our technologies are going to go additional and have additional impact. Then, building out our go-to-market org to have all the functions that we'd like to properly support our customers … that’s what I’ve been working extremely exhausting on.

InfoWorld: How essential do you feel that a hybrid cloud story is in luring enterprise customers?

Greene: I think you wish a hybrid story that permits you to be multicloud and on-prem and off-prem. The smaller the company, the more doubtless they’ll settle on one cloud supplier. Any sizable company is going to air two clouds. We’re seeing that. I’m surprised by however several folks on AWS area unit currently, "OK, we wish to try and do one thing with you, because we have a tendency to wish to air you, too."

Then they have their data centers -- you have got to interoperate with the on-prem. But something new folks area unit doing, they’re coming to the cloud, they’re coming to United States of America. I’m sure they’re going to AWS too. The data shows that. But the information goes to point out what quantity they’re coming back to United States of America i believe before long, because we’re definitely seeing it.

I think one in every of our ways in which we’re aiming to be ready to try this is we've things like Kubernetes for managing containers, if you have your stuff in containers. If Kubernetes is open source, then that can come across everything and you'll have a pleasant hybrid story.

InfoWorld: With Azure and Windows Server, Microsoft is developing a very sturdy hybrid strategy.

Greene: With on-prem and off-prem, not necessarily across platforms.

InfoWorld: That’s true, but …

Greene: Customers want to go across clouds.

InfoWorld: I’m thinking in terms of workload movableness between on-prem and the public cloud particularly. Microsoft’s Azure Stack running on Windows Server 2016 will primarily duplicate the Azure public cloud setting. That’s great for the Microsoft crowd. With both Kubernetes on-prem and in Google Cloud, are you wanting toward that same type of movableness for instrumentality workloads and UNIX operating system, that sort of a hybrid strategy?

Greene: That’s one. We’re pursuing a ton of hybrid methods, and you’ll see more coming back from United States of America over the next year. Do we have the massive enterprise footprint Microsoft has? No, we don’t, but folks moving to the cloud area unit seeing a method to …

InfoWorld: What about your partnership with Red Hat? It has a large enterprise footprint. It is also the biggest contributor to Kubernetes outside of Google.

Greene: We have Brian Stevens here World Health Organization was CTO and head of engineering at Red Hat, and he runs product in the cloud and is sweet friends with [Red Hat executive VP of merchandise and technologies] Paul Cormier. They are a natural ally of ours as a result of we’re thus committed to open supply.

InfoWorld: Do you see containers as a replay of the virtualization era?

Greene: It’s kind of an evolution. Containers are terribly integrated with the operative system, which no one was regarding to do once VMware came out. You needed the full virtual machine with no changes to the OS as a result of it wasn’t a market however. But Kubernetes is positively our fastest-growing product. BigQuery is up there too.

InfoWorld: There are some fascinating parallels. Google invented containers and drove cgroups into the UNIX operating system kernel.

Greene: I know. When I was at VMware I accustomed say: Hey you guys, don’t you want to use our virtual machines?

InfoWorld: Part of the rationale I’m harping on hybrid cloud and instrumentality movableness is that the particular movement of enterprise workloads to the general public cloud isn't happening as quickly as i assumed.

Greene: It’s happening more quickly than I thought it might.

InfoWorld: You think so?

Greene: Yes, it is. I think once folks understand so as to be secure they need to be in an exceedingly public cloud, they get a sense of urgency because nobody desires to be hacked.

InfoWorld: And nobody is secure.

Greene: Nobody is secure. I think it’s truly happening quicker in giant half for that reason. The other reason they’re moving is that they wish to require advantage of the information analytics tools and machine learning, and they know they need to travel to the cloud to induce that. That’s what is aiming to really begin differentiating companies: however well they use their information to serve their customers higher.

InfoWorld: Do you think it’s a unique type of adoption model among enterprise organizations than the previous days of the software package titans?

Greene: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think the CIO’s role has evolved, and they’re choosing SaaS merchandise to run their business, where they don’t have to bring it in and install it and develop the implementation any longer. A huge chunk of stuff they accustomed do is gone in terms of victimization SaaS rather than putting in Oracle or Microsoft on-prem and managing that installation. That’s a sea modification.

Then they go into the cloud for his or her infrastructure, so they’re not managing their own infrastructure any longer -- they’re managing a relationship. It’s a relationship that needs managing as a result of a ton of communication and facilitate and improvement needs to press on between each side.

I think it’s happening pretty quickly, and I think if it doesn’t happen quickly, companies area unit going to be at a giant disadvantage. I think it’s on United States of America to create it straightforward for them as a result of that’s what’s holding them back. They’re like: however do I do this? wherever area unit the tools? How riotous can it be? And it’s on United States of America to create it as nondisruptive as attainable.