In describing Google Cloud’s superb record of growth, innovation, capability, and AI leadership, CEO Thomas Kurian didn’t offer up any fancy formulations or grand theories but simply said that his company’s technology and engagement models and ecosystem must all serve the ultimate goal of understanding what customers want and need in today’s tumultuous times.
On Monday, I announced that Google Cloud has leapfrogged Microsoft to become #1 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 weekly rankings, ending Microsoft’s four-year reign as the world’s most-influential and most-innovative cloud/AI vendor. The following day, I had a chance to speak with Kurian, who became CEO of Google Cloud back in 2019 when it was #9 on the Cloud Wars Top 10, and you can watch that full interview here.
Before sharing some highlights from Kurian’s commentary, I’d like to offer some context around Google Cloud’s ascent by sharing the reasons behind my decision to elevate Google Cloud over Microsoft on the Cloud Wars Top 10:
The keys behind Google Cloud’s relentless ascent span a range of elements essential for helping customers succeed and grow and innovate in the most disruptive time in human history:
- Understanding customers’ unique goals, challenges, and environments: Back in 2019, Kurian became the first tech-industry CEO to use the term “customer empathy” and his insistence on that mindset throughout the Google Cloud organization has been essential to the company’s remarkable growth.
- Rising revenue as the ultimate expression of customer demand: For the past 10 quarters, Google Cloud has been at or very close to the top of the Cloud Wars Growth Charts. Customers today have an extraordinary range of highly-qualified cloud and AI vendors from which to choose — and the fact that Google Cloud’s revenue growth has frequently accelerated even as its revenue base has grown larger is an indisputable factor in its ascent to the #1 spot.
- Getting into security before security was cool: Four years ago, when Google Cloud acquired threat-intelligence specialist Mandiant, many “experts” were flabbergasted — ‘what the hell does security have to do with cloud infrastructure?’ they squealed. Google Cloud has continued to aggressively expand its security capabilities — most recently with the acquisition of Wiz — and that has become a strategic differentiator in the minds of customers. By contrast, I believe strongly that the exposure in early 2024 of Microsoft’s shocking security shortcomings have raised huge questions in the minds of corporate customers who view world-class cybersecurity as unconditional table stakes. For more on that, please see “Microsoft Cybersecurity Disaster Triggers Customer Doubt, Competitor Opportunity.”
- Rapid and massive buildout of enterprise-strength AI products and services: Centered on Gemini Enterprise, the Google Cloud AI portfolio extends deeply into developers with Vertex AI, into agentic applications via Google Cloud Applied AI, and an open architecture that is second to none. In combination with Google Cloud’s complete cloud stack, its top-to-bottom AI stack gives enterprise customers maximum flexibility, choice, and opportunity as they bet their companies on aligning with the right partner.
- Ecosystem program — and culture — that’s second to none: Under the leadership of Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud has built a global ecosystem organization that’s been a huge growth-driver over the past several years, and the company has not missed a beat in weaving its AI offerings and programs across that partner network.
Kurian: Understand Customer, Enhance Engagements, Optimize Ecosystem
As you can see in my 15-minute video interview with Kurian, he emphasizes the basics, with all of his thinking coming back seamlessly and inevitably to the customer. To me, this has been the key to Kurian’s enormous success in his seven years as Google Cloud CEO because while the company has always been able to develop world-class technology, before Kurian’s arrival Google Cloud fell woefully short in its ability to connect with customers, understand their current situations and desires, earn their trust, and then begin to address the technology opportunities.
“Across all these domains, I think the common theme is we understand a customer’s needs,” Kurian said in summarizing what’s fueled the success that Google Cloud and its customers have experienced.
“We understand how to link that customer need to our portfolio more broadly. Which could be, for example, now with AI, it’s a combination of not just offering AI models but agents and tools. And then linking those back to your data and your security platform to keep them secure and to understand and analyze the information you have.”
Another simple but extremely important point: while every tech company talks about how perfectly “open” it is, the reality doesn’t always match the rhetoric. For Google Cloud, openness is at the heart of its approach to customer success.
“And then most importantly,” Kurian said, “we’ve always said these solutions need to work in a heterogeneous environment. You can’t have these solutions just work for our cloud — they need to work with data that could sit in another cloud. And that’s also been a different perspective from some of the other players, and that’s part of the reason that some of these solutions have been very successful for us.”
One more highlight — and I again encourage you to watch the entire interview — is Kurian’s counsel to customers in every industry to close the dangerous and highly counterproductive gap between “IT” over here and “the business” over there. That’s been a corrosive issue for many years, and it’s becoming particularly insidious in today’s highly disruptive and fast-changing business environment.
“We’ve also been very clear with our clients, including the C-level executives and the boards that we speak with, that to do technology projects well, you now need to combine the business side and the technology so that the business sees the results from the work the technologists are doing,” Kurian said.
“Where we see a lot of interest is in organizations wanting to accelerate the adoption of some of the more modern tools to give themselves competitive advantage. And in different industries, those are different things: in retail, it’s ‘Can I grow my top line?’ In consumer packaged goods, it could be, ‘Can I advertise in a more-targeted fashion? Can I optimize my supply position?’
“In healthcare, it could be, ‘How do I offload the shift nurses and doctors who are doing a lot of work by providing some of these tools to take care of patients?’ And then, ‘Can I optimize all of the medical supplies and other things I have in order to get better margin relief?’,” Kurian said.
Final Thought
By focusing on the need to understand customers — their strengths, vulnerabilities, aspirations, capabilities, and current technology landscape — and constantly enhance that understanding, Kurian was by no means underselling the significance of world-class technology. And I recognized that quite clearly a few months ago in an analysis headlined Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s Crowning Achievement exploring how rapidly and comprehensively Google Cloud consolidated various offerings plus some breakthrough technologies into Gemini Enterprise, arguably the most complete AI platform on the planet.
It’s the balance of those two essential qualities — unconditional focus on customers plus relentless technological innovation — that has propelled Google Cloud to #1. And you can see more of that in my recent interview with longtime Google Cloud CTO Will Grannis on the need for business leaders to foster the right type of AI-first culture to drive superior business outcomes.
Right now, Google Cloud is doing a better job than any of its competitors in managing that balance and thereby helping its customers create their futures rather than just perfecting their pasts — and that is perhaps the key reason that Google Cloud has completed its journey from #9 to #1 on the Cloud Wars Top 10.
Well done, Google Cloud! (And be sure to check out the full interview with Kurian!)
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