In early 2018, the top executives of Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business or become a top-two player by 2023, according to the report by The Information. Some staffers in the company believe that if this goal is not achieved, it could withdraw from the market completely. After the report was published by many sites, the Google Spokesperson disputed that the company debated leaving the cloud market in 2018.
In 2018, according to Gartner, Google Cloud lagged behind Amazon, Microsoft, and Alibaba in the cloud computing market. The company is still considered as a small party in the cloud computing space but differs based on its features. With AI and ML offerings from the company, the business is picking but only in a specified space. Alphabet doesn’t declare the revenue for the cloud business, but in July, it said that it had reached an annualized revenue of $8 billion. Compared to AWS and Azure, the number seems small; AWS, a market leader in the space, generated $9 billion in revenue during the third quarter, while Azure delivered $4.3 billion in revenue in the third quarter, according to Griffin Securities Analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer.
According to the report, the then Alphabet CEO and Co-founder of Google Larry Page said that a distant third-place was not acceptable, but eventually, CFO Ruth Porat and Google CEO Sundar Pichai decided that Alphabet should remain in the business. The company, after a certain assessment, set a 5-year budget for capital expenditure of $20 billion to reach its cloud goal.
Recently, Oracle Executive Thomas Kurian replaced VMware Co-founder Diane Greene who had been leading the cloud business for the company. Google cloud plans to triple its salesforce over the next 3 years.
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