Google's new cloud boss is doing something that no company exec has done for almost a decade

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Diane Greene

AP

Diane Greene

New Google cloud boss Diane Greene is reopening diplomatic relations with the critical world of resellers as it gets aggressive about the cloud wars with Amazon, reports Bloomberg's Jack Clark.

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SADA Systems, a national-scale reseller of Google Apps and the Google Cloud Platform, says that Greene sat in on a recent customer meeting. Importantly, SADA says it was the first time an exec of Greene's stature sat in on such a meeting in nine years, per that report.

And Google is said to be investing lots of sales and marketing support for its cloud, ensuring that customers know exactly what Google Cloud Platform is offering: Functionally unlimited computing power, hosted in Google's hyper-efficient data centers.

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Building strong relationships with resellers is a critical move on Google's part to win over big businesses, which has long been a weakness of the search giant's Google Cloud Platform in the cloud wars with Amazon and Microsoft.

In corporate America, most IT departments don't usually deal directly with vendors like Google - instead, they rely on outside reseller partners, like SADA, who package the services up and actually put in the legwork of doing the installation.

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Google IO + Urs Cloud

Google

Google's Urs Hölzle

It's especially important that these companies have a reseller to guide them when dealing with cloud platforms like Google's, which represent a totally different way of thinking about IT infrastructure.

Google has been trying to push its cloud services on to partners as far back as 2011. But Google's partners have been asking for better support and improved lines of communication for just as long.

Given her extensive background in the enterprise, as a founder of hot company VMware, Greene understands these partner needs. The fact that she's showing up to customer meetings sends a positive message to partners.

Indeed, Google has been taking a number of steps to rekindle its relationships with resellers. In late 2015, Google announced an aggressive deal to encourage resellers to get their customers off of Microsoft Office 365 and on to the Google Apps cloud productivity suite.

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Just recently, Google's resident tech guru Urs Hölzle said that he thinks that the company could make more money from the cloud than from advertising by 2020. It seems that under Greene, Google Cloud Platform has finally recognized that the best way to do that is go for the big fish.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

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