Part of new CEO Thomas Kurian's master plan for Google Cloud to improve its enterprise chops is to target specific industries, and now he's taken a first step in that direction. On Wednesday, Google announced Google Cloud for Retail, a platform with tools meant to help retailers with predicting sales, recommending products with the help of artificial intelligence, and more. It's partnering with customers like Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl's, Shopify, and Target — retailers that also compete with Amazon. At a press briefing, Google Cloud engineers said it's the first time Google Cloud was launching an AI product to address a business process for a specific vertical. Kurian also emphasized that Google Cloud was building capabilities to help companies in specific industries, such as healthcare, media, financial services, retail, and manufacturing. "Our work in these industries would not be complete if we didn't build our enterprise capability," Kurian said onstage Tuesday at Google Cloud's annual conference. "We at Google Cloud want to be the best partner. We believe we can do that in two important ways. The first way is bringing expertise to help you on that journey. The second is to be the easiest cloud provider to do business with." New features Google Cloud for Retail will include hosting capabilities, which can help during peak traffic times like Black Friday, as well as increased support for peak times. This is important because if a website crashes during Black Friday , it can hurt a company's revenue and brand. In addition, it will include real-time inventory management and analytics capabilities to give retailers data on which products are in stock. There are also search capabilities, including a mobile-phone feature allowing customers to take photos or screenshots of products they like and use them to search for similar items sold by a retailer. Finally, it will include product recommendations intended to help retailers deliver personalized recommendations to customers, based on their online behavior. Read more: Under new CEO Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud is recruiting some of Amazon Web Services' fiercest critics into an expanded open source partnership "As you know, retail is in the midst of major transformation," Ratnakar Lavu, a senior executive vice president and chief technology officer of Kohl's, said onstage on Tuesday. "As a retailer, we needed to innovate. We also needed to become more engineering focus. And guess what, Google has that same DNA." Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at rmchan@businessinsider.com, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.<doc-sep>Coverage of Google’s sold-out annual cloud conference in San Francisco, as the search giant looks to extend its reach and build its momentum in the cloud. New Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has a lot of work to do. The company that basically invented the concept of hyperscale distributed computing has notably failed to capitalize on that accomplishment when it comes to enterprise computing, allowing a bookseller to dominate the still-emerging market for cloud computing. Amazon Web Services enjoys a healthy market share lead and recorded $25.7 billion in revenue during 2018, while Google’s revenue from cloud computing is buried in a smaller line item on its earnings statement that also includes G Suite customers and Chromebooks. Google deserves to be taken seriously as a cloud computing player. It controls technical infrastructure built to handle one of the most popular internet services yet devised by human beings and the cash machine generated by its search advertising services to plow into the capital expenditures needed to run cloud computing workloads at scale. But Google has struggled to translate that prowess into enterprise computing dollars, plagued by a reputation for nudging customers toward the Google Way To Build Infrastructure when a more consultative approach was desired. In an interview with GeekWire ahead of Google Cloud Next 2019, where more than 30,000 people are expected to attend, Kurian outlined two strategies to win cloudy hearts and minds: make developers happy while making it easier for corporate IT departments to do business with Google. The first part of that strategy, a series of managed services around very popular open-source databases, was announced Tuesday at Cloud Next 2019, while the second — plans to galvanize the Google Cloud sales team with new hires and new energy — will take some months to play out. Perhaps the most interesting challenge for Kurian in his role replacing Diane Greene as CEO will be adjusting to a new company culture after 22 years inside Oracle, which has been about as anti-Googly as it gets in more than one way. But there’s still plenty of time for Google Cloud to put its stamp on this market as billions of IT dollars continue to shift from data centers to cloud providers. (The following interview was edited for length and clarity.) GeekWire: I was talking to Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal last week and he mentioned that in his view the new database services announced Tuesday was an initiative you pushed the company to do. How did this all come together? Thomas Kurian: The background is fairly simple. We see a lot of customers wanting to develop applications using open source. Historically they wanted three things: They wanted a fully-managed infrastructure for the open source technology; second, they wanted enterprise support from the cloud provider; and third, they wanted the cloud provider to allow them to use their credits to consume the open-source offerings in addition to the cloud platform provider’s old products. We felt that many cloud providers were not working in a friendly manner to open source, and we felt that open source companies needed to have a cloud partner that would share the success of the platform with them. And so what we’ve done is a very simple thing. We’ve put together the leading open source companies, (and) they’re offering their services on Google Cloud as fully managed services. These products will be taken to market by Google’s cloud sales team and we will support it as a first class service in Google Cloud. So we’re giving customers and developers choice by giving them ease of use, because they get a single console from which they can access all these technologies. We’re giving them the ability to get integrated billing, metering and consumption of procurement. And we are sharing our success with the partners. GeekWire: This is not just a random group of companies you’ve assembled here, obviously. Three of these companies made a lot of noise over the last year or so with the changes to their licensing structures. How did this all come together? Kurian: We have had a long history with these companies. They are, by all accounts from the developers we talked to, the leading companies in open source. Frankly, the proof that they are the leading companies is because other cloud providers are attacking them and trying to take away their business model. If anything, the fact that some of our competitors are doing what they’re doing is a further articulation of the strength of these companies and their technology. And so rather than attacking them, we felt that we believe the long term platforms that win are those that foster ecosystems rather than those that compete with ecosystems. GeekWire: With respect to open source in general and some of the changes that have been contemplated by these companies, such as how cloud providers can use those open source projects, where have you come down on that? Kurian: We generally feel that if an open source company has done the hard work of creating the open source technology and providing a solution that developers and customers like, they should be fairly rewarded for that hard work. And if their livelihood, if you will, is threatened by alternative forms of monetization, which is taking away their ability to monetize the technology that they invented, we don’t think that’s necessarily the right thing for the industry. GeekWire: This is the first time we’ve had a chance to talk since you’ve taken this new role and I wanted to check in on a couple of things. One thing that strikes me is that it would appear from the outside that Oracle and Google are two very different corporations. I was wondering if you could give me a sense, now that you’ve been around a few months, of how they are alike and how they are different. Kurian: They’re alike and different in some ways. Every company that you work at is different from every other company that you work at, right? I’ll give you an example. Engineers in all companies are roughly the same. They are very focused and disciplined on how they deliver software. They’re very keen on understanding customer needs. They’re very keen on delivering technical solutions to needs that customers have. The way that Google brings its technology to market and the way that the relationship it has with customers are different than other companies. Partly because Google is such a technological powerhouse, but many companies in the industry look at it for solutions to their digital problems. And we’re bringing not just Google Cloud, but all of Google’s assets when we talk to a customer. And that’s probably different than the way other companies approach their go-to-market in the sense that when we talk to customers, it’s not just about Google Cloud. It’s about what we can do to transform their e-commerce, or what we can do to transform how they do advertising. So I would tell you probably the biggest difference with Google is not the engineers or things of that nature, but the breadth of assets that we bring when we talk to customers about technology transformation. GeekWire: From a cultural standpoint, though, they would seem very different companies. Kurian: You know, more is written about the differences between these companies than is reality. As you can imagine, some of the things that are written are true and some of it is just not factually true. I’ve learned a lot from working with people at Google about how the decision-making process on projects work and how we talk to customers and what we do with events. In many ways there are differences, but there’s far more similarity than people believe. GeekWire: How do you feel about working with military customers when it comes to cloud and AI services? Kurian: We’ve made a public statement about it. We made a statement around our AI principles that’s publicly documented. We stand by them. We do work with a number of agencies around the world, but they’re always in compliance with our AI practices and principles that we publicly made a statement about. GeekWire: With respect to the core cloud business, what do you think Google has to do to gain share in cloud computing? And what do you think is a realistic target for where Google might be in two to three years? Kurian: We have the lowest customer churn of any cloud provider in the industry. We have amazing customer loyalty. If you look at the top 10 companies in virtually every industry: nine of the top 10 media companies, seven of the top 10 retailers, six of the top 10 utility companies, five of the top 10 financial services companies, five of the top 10 manufacturing companies, five of the top 10 healthcare companies around the world — not just in the United States –use Google Cloud for their business transformation. We just need to hire and train and enable a world class sales team at scale. So for us to grow, the primary thing is to scale our go-to-market organization. And we’re very committed to doing that. We just need to hire and train and enable a world class sales team at scale. Today we have a great sales team, but we are far fewer in number than the other players. We just need to expand that. And as I talked to customers, they asked us to, one: expand our sales organization and our go-to-market teams. Second: specialize (that sales team) with deep expertise in technology and in industry. And third: make it easy to contract and do business with us. We are extremely committed to doing all three of them. GeekWire: How is Seattle factoring into your plans as you look to scale and grow the organization? Obviously the new campus is right around the corner in terms of being finished, and from what I understand there are going to be a sizable number of Google Cloud people in Seattle. Can you tell me a little bit about how you think about the area? Kurian: We certainly want to diversify our footprint as Google Cloud and as Google globally. Seattle is one of our top three or four locations where you’re going to see expanding. The campus was meant to provide a central location, let’s say, for Googlers to work in, because it’s much easier than being fragmented in a number of buildings around the city.<doc-sep>
After Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s recently minted CEO, joined the company, he took hundreds of meetings to learn what the company’s prospective and current customers were looking for. The overarching theme of those conversations was always similar, he told me during an interview at Google’s Cloud Next conference: “Love the technology — amazed at it. [They] think that it’s the best of the best. But they want more people that can help them adopt it and improvements to how they do business with us.” So that’s the first order of business at Google Cloud now. Kurian, who came to Google Cloud after 22 years at Oracle, said that the team is rolling out new contracts and plans to simplify pricing. Most importantly, though, Google will go on a hiring spree. “A number of customers told us ‘we just need more people from you to help us.’ So that’s what we’ll do,” Kurian said. I asked Kurian whether he believes that his predecessors made a mistake by not doing all of this already. Always the diplomat, Kurian denied that (of course). “No, I think it’s just the natural evolution of every company. Growing up, understanding their business, seeing an opportunity,” he said. “When I look at it, isn’t it a great position to be in? When you have customers saying ‘please hire more people to help me’ rather than ‘please go away from me?’ ” Enterprises want Google to figure out the enterprise, Kurian argues, because they want to use the company’s technology. “And so we’re trying to do that.” No matter what he thinks about Diane Greene’s tenure at Google Cloud, though, Kurian undoubtedly has the opportunity to reshape the organization now. When I asked him about how his own philosophy is different from his predecessor, though, he argued that it’s all about listening to customers and giving them what they want. And what they want is more help, but also better collaboration tools, for example, as well as more industry-specific solutions. Later on, though, he also noted that what Google Cloud will do going forward is to play to its strengths. “I think you will see us emphasizing our differentiators and strengthening the multi-cloud infrastructure,” he said, and highlighted today’s launch of Anthos as an example of what the company can do — and as a product that was developed in response to customer requests. “We’ve taken the area of security. We’ve taken the area of analytics. We’ve taken the area of AI — and we’ve invested a lot more in solutions there. And the reason is, that’s what customers want from us,” he added It’s no secret that Google is definitely focusing on bringing more enterprises onto its platform. That’s not to say that Google Cloud doesn’t care about startups, though. “When we say we’re focused on enterprise, it doesn’t mean we’re stopping to focus on the small and medium companies — on the digital natives and the startups,” Kurian said. “Historically, the complaint has always been ‘Google doesn’t focus on enterprises, they focus on digital natives. […] The perception outside that Google doesn’t care about enterprises is not true. And the statement that we’re now going to focus exclusively on enterprises is also not true.” Kurian argues that nine of the 10 largest media companies use Google Cloud, as well as seven of the 10 largest retailers and six of the top 10 enterprise companies. “Other cloud providers would have you believe that no one is using Google, which is not true,” he added. Talking about other cloud providers, it’s also worth noting that Google is taking a very different approach to open source than some of its competitors, and especially AWS. That’s something that isn’t likely to change under Kurian’s leadership at Google Cloud. “The most important thing is that we believe that the platforms that win in the end are those that enable rather than destroy ecosystems. We really fundamentally believe that,” he told me. “Any platform that wins in the end is always about fostering rather than shutting down an ecosystem. If you look at open-source companies, we think they work hard to build technology and enable developers to use it.” Kurian isn’t the kind of CEO who will directly attack his competitors in an interview, but he did come rather close to it in this context: “In order to sustain the company behind the open-source technology, they need a monetization vehicle.