Google Cloud adds sales head for North America amid platform maturity push

Dive Brief:

Google Cloud brought on Kirsten Kliphouse as President of North America Sales this month, the company announced Thursday.
Kliphouse will report to Robert Enslin, Google Cloud's president of global operations, who was appointed in April. In her new role, Kliphouse will lead "customer-facing field teams" for businesses of all sizes, from enterprise to SMB scale, overseeing how customers adopt Google Cloud technology, according to a statement provided to CIO Dive.
Kliphouse served as SVP and general manager of North America Commercial Sales at Red Hat and spent 25 years at Microsoft.

Thrilled to welcome Kirsten Kliphouse as President of North America Sales for Google Cloud. She's an incredible leader and will help us add new customers and grow our presence globally with brands @ups @whirlpoolusa @viacom & many others!
— Robert Enslin (@RobertEnslin) July 11, 2019

Dive Insight:

This year, Thomas Kurian joined Google Cloud as CEO, taking over leadership from former CEO Diane Greene.

The change in leadership marked the beginning of a new Google Cloud era. Greene had helped mature the company into a viable enterprise technology vendor, which could remain relevant in a crowded market. Kurian's role was to build on the company's foundation be drastically expanding its sale's reach.

Already, industry has seen Kurian's efforts play out. He said he wanted to compete "much more aggressively" in the cloud market, with initial focus on building a strong sales and support staff. The addition of Enslin and Kliphouse are extensions of that push.

Signs of Google Cloud growth also come from acquisitions in the market. This year it has aggressively acquired companies that will have a market impact.

In June, Google bought BI platform Looker for $2.6 billion and rolled an Alphabet cybersecurity moonshot into the business. Then earlier this week, Kurian announced the acquisition of Elastifile, which the company expects will close later this year. Elastifile's bread and butter is file storage for enterprise-scale applications in the cloud.

But the big play with Elastifile is helping customers move traditional workloads onto Google Cloud. It's a move out of Microsoft's playbook, where Google is trying to make it as easy as possible to migrate to its cloud platform.

Recently, Microsoft has applied the migration methodology. End of support for SQL Server 2008 creates a push for customers to move to the cloud and Microsoft is making the transition as easy as possible.