With Amazon and Microsoft gobbling up large portions of the share on the cloud market, Google Cloud is playing catch-up.
Still, since former Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian took the reins as Google Cloud CEO, it's expanded on its ambitions.
It's hired a new leader, Robert Enslin from SAP, to head sales, customer operations, and partnerships. At the time of its last earnings call in July, Google revealed that its cloud business has an annual revenue run rate of $8 billion, even as Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google Cloud plans to triple its sales force in the next few years.
On top of that, Google Cloud recently made changes in its sales organization to go after bigger customers and reward high-performing sales employees. It's even making some big acquisitions, such as its $2.6 billion acquisition of data analytics startup Looker.
Google Cloud is also releasing more products to cater to enterprises. For example, it launched Anthos, a hybrid cloud product - meaning it allows customers to run their applications and data not only on Google Cloud, but also on private data centers. Notably, it can even run on rival clouds - a strategy Kurian reportedly tried to execute at Oracle. With Anthos, Google Cloud beat Amazon to launching a generally available hybrid cloud product.
