B4| Monday, February 24, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Early progress was slowed
when Ms. Greene was unable
to get backing for some acqui-
sitions to help expand in the
cloud, people close to Ms.
Greene said. Ms. Greene
couldn’t enlist Chief Executive
Officer Sundar Pichai to meet
with GitHub executives to
close a deal. Google lost out to
Microsoft, which agreed in
2018 to buy the coding-collab-
oration site for $7.5 billion in
stock, with Microsoft CEO Sa-
tya Nadella’s support.
Ms. Greene left in January
2019, replaced by Mr. Kurian.
Since joining from Oracle,
where he spent two decades in
areas including product devel-
opment, Mr. Kurian has said
his priority is making the
cloud business more respon-
sive to corporate customers.
Under Mr. Kurian, Google
bought data-analytics firm
Looker for $2.6 billion. This
past week Google announced
it was buying Cornerstone
Technology, an IT-services
company that helps companies
shift their work to the cloud.
Last year Google set up a
team to help customers
achieve their objectives on the
company’s cloud service, said
John Jester, Google Cloud vice
president for customer experi-
ence, who leads the effort.
“We weren’t focused on the
enterprise at the level we
needed to be,” said Mr. Jester,
who joined from Microsoft.
Google has picked up mar-
quee customers. Riot Games
Inc., maker of the online vid-
eogame League of Legends
and owned by Chinese tech gi-
antTencent HoldingsLtd., is
moving its data analytics from
Amazon to Google Cloud be-
cause of sophisticated tools
Google Cloud offered, people
familiar with the move said.
Google’s cloud effort under
Mr. Kurian has encountered
challenges. Google teamed up
with the second-largest health
system in the U.S. to collect
information on 50 million
American patients, sparking a
federal inquiry and criticism
from patients and lawmakers.
—Robert McMillan
contributed to this article.Mr. Kurian also upset some
salespeople when he shifted
their compensation plans by
lowering their base pay but of-
fering more in bonuses for the
deals they secured, former
employees said. Google de-
clined to comment.
Over the past year, the
changes at Google Cloud have
been noticeable to partners
and customers, said Christian
Rast, global head of technol-
ogy atKPMG International,
which teamed up with Google
Cloud in mid-2018 before Mr.
Kurian joined. Mr. Rast said
Google Cloud has a better un-
derstanding of how to work
with big legacy enterprises
than it did in the past.
Google has a history of of-
fering consumer products in
the cloud, providing services
such as email, documents and
spreadsheets as well as selling
storage and computing ser-
vices. But it began to pursue
enterprise contracts with big
business more formally in- At the time, Google’s
cloud business was led by Di-
ane Greene, a veteran of the
enterprise-software world and
co-founder of software pro-
vider VMware Inc., now ma-
jority-owned by Dell Technolo-
gies Inc.
last year, or $8.9 billion, up
from $4.1 billion, or 3.7% of to-
tal sales, two years earlier. Al-
phabet only began separately
reporting cloud sales in the
last quarter, further highlight-
ing the growth push.
Mr. Kurian’s changes have
led to tensions within Google’s
cloud ranks, where engineers
had largely worked unencum-
bered by deadlines, according
to current and former employ-
ees. Engineers were oftenmore focused on projects they
deemed interesting, former
employers said, rather than
what customers were wanting.
That meant such features as
databases and identity man-
agement were neglected, for-
mer employers said.
Under Mr. Kurian, said a
former Google Cloud engineer,
“we have to build stuff we can
sell. People weren’t used to
having that.”ing to former employees. The
size of China’s market makes
it an attractive target for
cloud providers, but political
tensions with the U.S. present
obstacles.
In 2010, Google pulled its
search engine out of the coun-
try over the censoring of
search results. When plans to
resume work in China surfaced
in 2018, they drew internal
backlash, causing the company
to abandon the effort.
“Until we see further prog-
ress in ongoing discussions
between the U.S. government
and Chinese government,
we’re waiting,” Mr. Kurian
said. “We haven’t made that
decision yet.”
Cloud computing has be-
come one of the hottest mar-
kets for tech companies as
corporations shift more of
their IT budgets to renting
data storage and number-
crunching capacity rather than
buying their own hardware.
Gartner estimates companies
will spend more than $260 bil-
lion on cloud services this
year, up more than a third
from 2018.
Within Google, the cloud
business has been growing in
importance. The cloud gener-
ated 5.5% of Alphabet salesGoogle’s decision to cut
jobs at its cloud-computing di-
vision is the latest move in a
yearlong effort by Thomas Ku-
rian to shake up the unit and
put greater focus on delivering
growth to parent Alphabet
Inc.
Mr. Kurian, after joining
from Oracle Corp. in Novem-
ber 2018, imposed hard proj-
ect deadlines, riling some
workers used to looser execu-
tion targets, according to for-
mer Google employees, some
of whom left because of the
move. The job cuts that
Google disclosed last week to
The Wall Street Journal were
part of a restructuring aimed
at improving how the com-
pany works with cloud cus-
tomers, it said.
Among the objectives
Google has set since Mr. Ku-
rian joined are to become one
ofthe top two cloud-comput-
ing providers and exceed $25
billion in sales within a few
years, according to former em-
ployees. Google has room to
grow—its market share in the
cloud is just 4%, according to
Gartner Inc. It trails Ama-
zon.comInc.,MicrosoftCorp.
and China’sAlibaba Group
HoldingLtd.
Google wouldn’t comment
on specific internal targets,
and Mr. Kurian said league ta-
bles aren’t his priority. “I
don’t wake up counting if
we’re first, second or third
biggest,” he said. “If we de-
liver the right product innova-
tion, we’ll grow with [custom-
ers] and see results.”
To spur growth, Mr. Kurian
has focused on six industries,
including financial services
and health care, to chase cus-
tomers. He is also building out
regional sales teams.
Mr. Kurian is also exploring
ways for Google Cloud to pur-
sue business in China, accord-
BYAARONTILLEY
Google Plots Way to Top of Cloud
Job cuts are part of
push to focus on
delivering growth
to parent Alphabet
The web giant seeks to vault from fourth place in the cloud sector. The Google Cloud Next ’19 forum.MICHAEL SHORT/BLOOMBERG NEWSChanges made
by Thomas
Kurian as cloud
chief have riled
some
engineers and
salespeople.TECHNOLOGY WSJ.com/Tech
fine-tune their recommenda-
tions to customers by expand-
ing the trove of financial data
they use to make suggestions.
The move would cap a rapid
rise for Credit Karma, which is
backed by funders including
private-equity firm Silver Lake
and financial-technology ven-
ture firm Ribbit Capital.
Based in San Francisco and
founded in 2007 by Mr. Lin,
Nichole Mustard and Ryan
Graciano, Credit Karma at one
point was considering an ini-
tial public offering no earlier
than late 2019.
But the IPO market has
looked more dubious after thedisappointing debuts of some
startups, including Uber Tech-
nologies Inc. The merger mar-
ket, especially for financial-
technology companies, has
remained strong.
Such deals have accounted
for several of the largest
transactions announced so far
this year, including Morgan
Stanley’s $13 billion purchase
of E*Trade Financial Corp.,
announced this past week, and
Visa Inc.’s $5.3 billion acquisi-
tion of Plaid Inc. last month.
Intuit, based in Mountain
View, Calif., was founded in
1983 and went public in 1993.
Best known for its bookkeep-
ing software, the company has
said it wants to push further
into the finances of the indi-
viduals and businesses it
serves by adding more offer-
ings to its platform.
The company is set to re-
port its fiscal second-quarter
earnings on Monday after-
noon.Continued from page B1Intuit Near
$7 Billion
Acquisition
The TurboTax
maker has wanted to
add more personal-
finance offerings.Nili Gilbert
Co-FounderandPortfolioManager
MatarinCapitalManagementJane Fraser
PresidentandCEO
GlobalConsumerBanking
CitigroupCatherine P. Bessant
ChiefOperationsandTechnologyOficer
BankofAmericaA.J. Murphy
ManagingDirector
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