Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of cloud services at Google LLC, speaks during the Google Cloud Next ’19 event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, April 9, 2019. The conference brings together industry experts to discuss the future of cloud computing.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is shaking up the unit’s engineering organization in hopes of gaining market share more quickly.
Kurian announced a number of changes among its technical leadership in an email to staff Friday that was viewed by CNBC. This includes replacing Eyal Manor, who has led engineering and key Cloud products including Anthos for five years, according to the email.
Manor, who has been at Google for nearly 15 years, will be looking for another role within the company, the email said.
Brad Calder will take over Manor’s responsibilities. A Google Cloud spokesperson told CNBC that Calder will also oversee security and data analytics in a more expansive role than Manor previously held. Calder will report to Kurian in a change that Kurian said will allow the technical teams to “work more closely with me and the Cloud leadership team, as well as [Google CEO] Sundar [Pichai] and the Google leadership team” on longer-term strategy.
“With 15+ years of experience in Cloud, Brad has the proven expertise to take on a broader role to shape and drive the entire strategy” for Google Cloud, Kurian wrote.
Some aspects of Calder’s new role were previously reported by ZDnet.
Pali Bhat, design and product vice president, will assist Calder with the transition, Kurian wrote.
The shakeup is meant to help continue to grow Google Cloud’s market share while streamlining an organization that has ballooned in the last several years since Kurian took over.
With 10% market share in the second quarter, according to Synergy, the company trails well behind market leader Amazon, with 33%, and Microsoft, with 20%. It has made progress, though, since Kurian took over in late 2018. Google had only about 7% share as of the fourth quarter of 2018, Synergy estimated.
“We have an enormous opportunity to continue to grow the business by expanding our total addressable market in new ways,” Kurian said in his email. “As the market changes, the needs of our products continue to evolve, and it’s important that we evolve our organization to support this growth.”
Kurian also said that Google Cloud Platform and technical infrastructure organization have more than doubled in the past few years and the “demands of shaping long-term strategy while focusing on day-to-day operations have continued to accelerate.”
“As a result, we felt that it was the right time to unify the broad portfolio under Brad Calder,” his email said.
Kurian also outlined other changes that affect the cloud’s data organization, the core and system infrastructure teams, chief of staff, and application teams. He said Manor’s departure will also create an opening for a new leader to run the company’s Application Modernization Platform, or AMP, and until that role is filled, he would appoint several other leaders to take on more responsibility.
Manor is at least the third VP to leave the Cloud unit in recent months. Google fired developer relations vice president Amr Awadallah in July after he published a manifesto in which he confessed to “past” antisemitism, which CNBC found came after months of discontent among his reporting leaders. That caused one of “a number of organizational changes” already underway, Manor said at the time.