You may recall that Google bought out VMware, one of the oldest and biggest in the virtualization game, in order to net themselves the company’s co-founder and star CEO, Diane Greene. The plan was to have Greene help with Google’s Cloud Services division as they looked to become a more serious player in the infrastructure as a service space. Coming in as a definitive, but distant third behind industry leader Amazon Web Services and runner-up Microsoft Azure, Google looked to move past the small-time and niche deals that put their cloud service where it was. On the heels of rumors that they may try to goad Amazon into a price war at an upcoming tech conference, Greene is preparing to bolster Google’s cloud offerings to prepare for full-on war with Amazon Web Services.
At an internal sales meetup in Las Vegas, Greene gave a crowd of normally laid-back Googlers a bit of a shock when she suggested that they start taking larger corporate customers more seriously, as well as adopting a more salesman mindset. As part of that change of course, naturally, Google plans to boost their technological offerings in the cloud space to attract bigger customers. Plans to expand current data centers, upgrade equipment and lay down 12 new data centers in the next 18 months are one of the bigger parts of the plan. Mass hiring is also planned, mainly in the sales and marketing areas. As Google begins to work on and offer cloud solutions that are aimed at a more general audience, a marketing team will be there to find customers and explain Google’s various offerings to them.
Greene’s change of direction and pure grit in the face of Google’s thus-far underwhelming performance in the cloud space may be able to turn things around for them and attract larger customers, which is the key strategy they’re hoping to use to pull cloud sector profits and sales up. Although they have a long way to go if they want to pull out of third place in the market, Greene’s business savvy might be just what’s needed; after all, when she was fired from VMware in 2008 following a fight with some board members, the company posted a significant loss in value shortly after.