Here's what six startup execs have to say about the big CEO shakeup at Google Cloud

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Here's what six startup execs have to say about the big CEO shakeup at Google Cloud

Diane Greene

Steve Jennings/Getty

Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud

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In November, Google Cloud's Diane Greene announced she was stepping down as CEO.

This made a splash in the news, as Greene was hired at Google Cloud to run its enterprise operation and has strong enterprise chops, as a co-founder of VMware.

In January, former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian will replace Greene. Kurian, who had been at Oracle for 22 years, was the company's president of product development, where he led its cloud-computing efforts. He resigned in September after clashing with Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison.

Greene said she hadn't planned to stay in her position as Google Cloud's CEO for long. Still, now that she's leaving, and a long-time Oracle executive is moving over to Google, major shifts in the cloud wars may be coming.

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At Amazon's cloud business's annual conference, AWS re:Invent, we spoke with six enterprise startup executives in the industry on their thoughts on this leadership shakeup. Here's what they have to say about what it means for Google and for the cloud computing industry.

Get the latest Google stock price here.

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Asim Razzaq, CEO of YotaScale

Asim Razzaq, CEO of YotaScale

My thoughts are Google is going on an identity search. It historically has been a consumer company, and it's trying to be an enterprise company. I have friends who work at Google. There's frustrations that the mindset is not there when it comes to an enterprise mindset. That's the challenge in transformation.

Oracle started as an extremely strong enterprise company. His challenge won't be technology. It will be culture and mindset. It's part of the business as Google cloud. It's not the same buyer who will buy Gmail as the buyers of Google cloud infrastructure.

Manish Gupta, CMO of Redis Labs

Manish Gupta, CMO of Redis Labs

Google has had a hard time penetrating the enterprise marketplace. You need a go-to-market engine. Google has been trying, but it has not made progress. If you compete with AWS and Microsoft Azure, then how do you go from the DNA of being consumer-centric to enterprise-centric? Diane was a victim of that, I suspect. [Kurian] was a powerhouse for go-to-market, so he'll bring that to the table.

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Todd Blaschka, COO of TigerGraph

Todd Blaschka, COO of TigerGraph

I think Diane came in to do what Google wanted her to do, to work on the business side of Google. Google is working to catch up. I hope the new CEO will take that even further. They're saying, let's up the level to be on par with other cloud offerings.

Mårten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne

Mårten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne

I said, wow, when it happened. Diane Greene is an immensely competent leader. She can't leave a job without it being big news. She's so competent, well-known and respected. Thomas Kurian was known as the architect of Oracle's roadmap for a long time. For him to step down and move to Google is also a remarkable shift. Google doesn't know how to sell and it certainly doesn't know how to sell to enterprises, which means enterprise sales and having customer intimacy, not thinking you're smarter than the customer.



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Francois Ajenstat, CPO of Tableau

Francois Ajenstat, CPO of Tableau

Google is the #3 in the cloud for sure. Diane did an amazing job bringing it together. It will be interesting to see how Thomas takes his enterprise background to bring it to the next level.

Phillip Merrick, CEO of Fugue

Phillip Merrick, CEO of Fugue

With Diane Greene, they had someone who was really well respected for understanding enterprise. Thomas has very much the same reputation. It signals they're even more interested in penetrating enterprise.

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