While Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat declined to offer specific details about Google Cloud’s revenue levels or growth rates during Monday’s earnings call, they did offer a few insights during prepared remarks and Q&A.
Here’s a look at some of their verbatim statements. And I focused on comments about Google Cloud, which has been greatly reinvigorated since new CEO Thomas Kurian took control about 10 weeks ago.
Google Cloud as a growth driver within Alphabet
- “Once again our results were driven by ongoing strength in mobile search, along with important contributions from YouTube followed by Cloud.” — CFO Porat
- “ ‘Other’ revenues for Google were $5.4 billion, up 25% year-over-year fueled by Cloud and Play and partially offset by hardware. Google Cloud Platform remains one of the fastest-growing businesses in Alphabet with strong customer momentum reflected particularly in demand for our compute and data-analytics products.” — Porat
- “We are pleased with the momentum of Google Cloud platform and the balanced growth of new customers as well as expansion within existing customers.” — Porat
Google Cloud’s Market Momentum and Customer Engagement
- “Thomas [Kurian] has really hit the ground running—just a few weeks ago, I was on stage with him at our Cloud Next event where we hosted a sold-out crowd of more than 30,000 attendees.” — CEO Pichai
Sundar Pichai - “I was excited to announce Anthos, which gives customers an elegant solution to both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud in a single technology stack.” — Pichai
- “We are deeply committed to becoming the most customer-centric cloud provider for enterprise customers and making it easier for companies to do business with us in terms of new contracting, pricing and more.” — Pichai
- “Today nine of the world’s 10 largest media companies, seven of the 10 largest retailers, and more than half of the 10 largest companies in manufacturing, financial services, communications and software use Google Cloud.” — Pichai
- “We also announced the addition of two new cloud regions in Seoul and Salt Lake City, which we plan to open in 2020. These new cloud regions will build on our current footprint of 19 cloud regions and 58 data centers around the world.” — Pichai
Google Cloud’s Differentiation in the Market
“The five key things are security and reliability, and being really open about hybrid multi-cloud—customers don’t want to be locked into any one cloud provider. Also AI and ML as a capability. And finally, as customers think about digital transformations, we bring all of Google’s advances to bear to help them through the journey.” — Pichai
Go-to-Market Enhancements, Including Hiring Rob Enslin
“We are really accelerating and scaling up go-to-market both internally and through our channel partners—that’s been a huge focus. I am incredibly excited that as announced a couple of weeks ago, [former SAP senior sales executive] Rob Enslin has joined us to head go-to-market. Along with Thomas, each of them brings close to three decades of serving enterprise customers, so that reflects the commitment we have.” — Pichai
Investing in Google Cloud
“The biggest increase was in R&D expenses with headcount growth in Cloud as the largest driver. … In terms of product areas, the most sizable headcount increases were in Cloud for both technical and sales roles. … You can see that in R&D where we continue to invest in technical talent for priority areas like Cloud, search and machine learning.” — Porat
When Will Alphabet Release Financial Figures for Google Cloud?
“We are definitely seeing a strong momentum, and look forward to being able to share more at the appropriate time.” — Pichai
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