How Google’s Become World’s Fastest-Growing Cloud: the Thomas Kurian Effect

In early February, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian delivered the quote of the year: “Today, where people want cloud to be is not about [infrastructure and packaged apps]. It’s really about, ‘Can you give me new capabilities that I could not get before?’ ”

(On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Google Cloud is #4, after starting the year at #7.)

That’s truly prophetic insight at any time, but particularly so since Kurian made that remark a month before the pandemic knocked the world off its axis. 

Since then, most cloud providers have internalized at least some part of that thinking and that’s a very good thing because their business customers are confronting existential threats that require them to rapidly build “new capabilities” of a wildly different type.

But with that mindset in place since he took over as Google Cloud CEO in January 2019, Kurian has turned his company into the hottest enterprise-cloud vendor in the world and generated hypergrowth for 4 straight quarters.

If you want to get the full story behind how Kurian and president Rob Enslin have done that, then by all means please check out our 10-part Cloud Wars Top 10 Special Report and our extensive analysis of Google Cloud. 

Here’s a brief snapshot into what you’ll find in the 5 sections through which we’ve analyzed Google Cloud: 

• Opportunities: we offer numerous possibilities where they’re uniquely qualified;
• Challenges: we describe intense future competition with Oracle, the company where Kurian ran product development for more than 20 years;
• Differentiation: Kurian has fused existing tech expertise with a new and deep sense of customer empathy; 
• Leadership: Kurian was, after all, CEO of the Year for 2019; and 
• Big Questions: among many others, can Google Cloud move into industry-specific solutions while remaining on excellent terms with SAP and other app vendors?

We hope you’ll check out our analysis of the growth prospects in 2021 for the market’s hottest cloud vendor. Earlier this week, we posted our in-depth analyses of Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce, and in our Special Report Introduction offers not only a guide to the analysis for each company but also some intriguing perspectives on just how big and influential the cloud business has become. 

Next week we’ll roll out analyses of SAP, Oracle, IBM, Workday, ServiceNow and Adobe to complete the 10-part Cloud Wars Top 10 Special Report.

We hope you’ll join us, and look forward to your feedback.

Subscribe to the Cloud Wars Newsletter for in-depth analysis of the major cloud vendors from the perspective of business customers. It’s free, it’s exclusive and it’s great!