In the Acceleration Economy Cloud Wars Top 10 CEO Outlook 2023 series, Bob Evans interviewed Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. The company ranks #3 on the Cloud Wars Top 10. In this CEO Outlook moment, Kurian identifies three reasons why partnerships form, using Google Cloud partnerships as examples.
Highlights
00:10 — “When you’re partnering with someone, you’re partnering for a purpose,” says Kurian. He highlights three primary reasons that partnerships form.
00:26 — The first reason he shares is that it’s to help someone evolve a particular area of technology in a fundamental way. The partnership Google Cloud has with Mayo Clinic is an example of this, with the application of artificial intelligence and large-scale analytics to rare diseases.
00:48 — The second reason is that it could be changing the definition of a market for a customer. The work that Google Cloud has done with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange exemplifies this, as this partnership aims to open access to financial markets and make them more accessible to institutional clients and retail investors.
01:14 — The third reason involves changing a market in a fundamental way without necessarily redefining it through the application of technology. Kurian shares two examples of this: Its partnerships with Renault and Ford.
01:29 — Google Cloud recently announced its new partnership with Renault. The goal of this partnership is to bring the capabilities of Alphabet to Renault, including what it’s doing both to the vehicle and in the cloud. Through this partnership, the two companies will fundamentally redefine the nature of the vehicle, how efficiently it’s digitized, and how efficiently it will work.
01:55 — Google Cloud is doing the same through its partnership with Ford. These are reconstituting the nature of what a vehicle is by providing digital representations of vehicles. For instance, Federal Express, UPS, or other clients will have an accurate, up-to-the-minute representation of the space available in the vehicle, enabling them to dynamically optimize their fleet.
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