Google revealed that its cloud business is on run rate of more than $8 billion, and it plans to triple the size of its salesforce
GoogleGoogle Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud Next 2019
- On Thursday, Google Cloud announced it reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion.
- Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat says Google Cloud is the company's third largest driver of revenue growth.
- Google Cloud also plans to triple its salesforce over the next few years, the company said.
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Google Cloud reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion, Google announced Thursday after announcing its quarterly earnings. Annual run rate is a measure of how much revenue the business will generate in the next year, assuming that everything about the business stays the same.
The Google Cloud business includes Google Cloud Platform, its rival to the market-leading Amazon Web Services, and G Suite, which competes with Microsoft Office. This $8 billion run rate figure is the first hint we've gotten about Google Cloud revenue since February of 2018, when Google said it was a $1 billion-per-quarter business.
On the earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also reinforced Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's previously announced plan to increase Google Cloud's sales and go-to-market strategy by taking pages from the book of Oracle, Kurian's previous employer.
"We continue to build our world class Cloud team to help support our customers and expand the business, and are looking to triple our salesforce over the next few years," Pichai said on the call.
Read more: The new CEO of Google Cloud explains the updated master plan for taking on Amazon Web Services
Pichai said on the earnings call that customers are turning to Google Cloud because of its reliability and uptime, flexibility, data management and analytics features, and artificial intelligence.
Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said on the earnings call that Google Cloud was the company's third largest driver of revenue growth for Alphabet overall - behind search ads and YouTube - and it was the largest driver within its Other Revenues segment.
Alphabet beat Wall Street's expectations on Thursday with a net revenue of $31.7 billion, and after the bell, its stock rose 8%.
Just April, Google Cloud announced Anthos, which allows customers to run their applications and data not only on Google Cloud, but also private data centers and even rival clouds. Google also recently built three new data centers and launched a cloud region in Japan. It plans to build an additional cloud region in Las Vegas.