Google Cloud CEO Kurian Pledges Aggressive Cloud Sales Investment

Google Cloud is arming itself with more cloud sales resources to give rivals a run for their money, the cloud division's new leader said on Tuesday.

Thomas Kurian said that Google will be investing heavily in its cloud sales organization, as well as its relationship with the channel, mirroring what Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company's Q1 2019 earnings call earlier this month.

"You will see us accelerate the growth even faster than we have to date," Kurian said at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. "We are hiring some of the best talent from around the industry to grow our sales organization, and you will see us competing much more aggressively as we go forward."

[Related: Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene Out In 2019, Former Oracle Exec Thomas Kurian To Step In]

A longtime Oracle executive, Kurian left the company in September. In November, former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced she would be stepping down in early 2019, and Kurian, Oracle's former president of product development, would be taking over as Google Cloud CEO, responsible for the company's Google Cloud Platform public cloud and the G Suite collaboration applications.

Google Cloud in recent years has made its mission to go after more enterprise customers, and the cloud giant is in part relying on its partner ecosystem for help in that department.

Kurian said during the conference that Google Cloud intends on focusing on specific verticals, such as financial services, and working more with channel partners.

Google Cloud is focused now on winning over larger business customers as it continues "to invest in and expand our sales and distribution channels," Google CEO Pichai said earlier in February.

Google doesn't break out financials for its cloud division, but the company said during its latest earnings call that its cloud division continues to deliver "sizable revenue growth." The Google Cloud Platform, the company said, continues to be among the fastest-growing businesses inside Alphabet.

Kurian revealed that Google Cloud is also introducing a “customers for life” program designed to help it retain existing customers and bring in new ones.

"I talked to some of largest companies and said, 'Why did you choose Google?' And uniformly, the feedback I got is, 'By far the best technology in the market, the technology is amazing, I've never seen anything like it.' This is what I heard over and over again," Kurian said.