Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I share insights from a conversation with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on how his company is driving speed, agility, and innovation for customers through AI and cloud technologies.
Highlights
00:21 — A little background: Thomas Kurian was the executive I chose to be the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024, based on a tremendous performance that Google Cloud had throughout the year. It’s the fastest-growing major cloud provider and finished Q3 with a growth rate of 35%. So, clearly, the sorts of things that Kurian and Google Cloud are seeing are winning the hearts, minds, and wallets of customers.
01:02 — You can see the full-length video with his insights. Kurian said UPS is using infrastructure to achieve better routing for their trucks to get things around more quickly. Google Cloud has helped both Hanes and Macy’s with their search to be able to get into the hands of consumers more of what those consumers want to see more quickly and more easily.
02:09 — Kurian also described the synergy between cloud and AI: cloud makes it simpler for customers to consume and deploy AI, and AI is making cloud simpler for customers to consume and deploy.
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03:05 — Kurian also gave examples of how Google Cloud is helping its customers infuse AI into the products and services that those businesses are then selling to their customers. This is becoming a very important way where AI not only helps companies operate internally more efficiently and more rapidly, but also now AI going into products and services is becoming something that, quickly, he said, will be mainstream.
03:39 — Google Cloud was the fastest-growing company on the Cloud Wars Top 10. So, among a set of companies with extremely high growth rates, Google Cloud stood out on that. I mention this not so much because it speaks to the sales performance of Google Cloud, but rather that performance serves as a proxy for the customer demand.
04:06 — These businesses have lots of choices, lots of great cloud companies they could choose from, and more and more of them are moving toward Google Cloud because of this unique and very powerful focus that Kurian has on helping customers achieve business outcomes.
