TK is executing the playbook that LE wouldn’t let him run with at Oracle

This is getting interesting. LE may get angry and decide to squash Alphabet

Business Insider - Paid Version - ROSALIE CHAN APRIL 12, 2019

Bloomberg previously reported that Thomas Kurian— now the CEO of Google Cloud — left Oracle after clashing with co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison over cloud strategy.

Now Kurian appears to be trying to do for Google Cloud what Ellison reportedly wouldn't let him do at Oracle: Support other clouds, even those from its fiercest competitors.

Case in point: Google Cloud's new Anthos, a platform that allows customers to manage their infrastructure across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and their own data centers.

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Back at his old company Oracle, the now-Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian butted heads with Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison over a key cloud strategy, Bloomberg previously reported.

Essentially, Kurian wanted Oracle's software to run on rival clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, while Ellison wanted it to stay locked in to Oracle's own cloud, the report said. Oracle declined to comment on this story.

But now that Kurian is the new boss of Google Cloud, he seems to be taking the chance to run the playbook that he couldn't at his previous employer.

The biggest announcement from Google Cloud Next, its annual conference, was Anthos— a software-based cloud platform that lets allows customers to manage their infrastructure across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and their own data centers. In other words, Google is supporting its rivals in a real way.

"It allows [customers] to secure and manage across multiple clouds in a single, consistent way," Kurian said onstage on Tuesday.

Read: Google Cloud is beating Amazon to the punch with Anthos, a new hybrid cloud offering

This announcement is a nod from Google that the industry is headed in this direction, says Gartner senior director and analyst Sanjeev Mohan. Although Google Cloud started to take a multiple cloud strategy under previous CEO Diane Greene, Kurian is showing a strong follow-up, Mohan says.

"I really like the openness that they are showing in this," Mohan told Business Insider. "I think he's bringing the whole focus on embracing multi-cloud, embracing open source and embracing partners while focused on the end user solutions."

"How do you convert those leads into dollars?"

According to the RightScale State of the Cloud Report, 84% of companies are taking a strategy of using multiple clouds, suggesting that Google is on the right path here.

But what's significant about Google Cloud's new approach is that its product makes it easy for customers to run their software and services across different cloud environments. Normally, it's tricky and time-consuming for developers to write and deploy these cross-cloud integrations.

With Anthos, though, Google is promising that developers will just have to set up their applications once, and they will work whether it's running on Google Cloud, an on-premise data center, or another cloud.

"If you're a developer, you get to avoid the pain of rewriting your code just to deploy to another cloud," Jennifer Linn, Google's director of product management for Anthos, said on stage at the Next conference.

Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure and fellow at Google, says Google is still an engineering-focused company at heart, which guided the development of Anthos — but acknowledges that this technology could lead into more opportunity for the company. Kurian has said that he plans on growing the company's sales team rapidly; the rise of Anthos arms those salespeople with a solution to an actual problem that they're having.

"We have tons of leads," Brewer told Business Insider. "How do you convert those leads into dollars? That's where Thomas Kurian has direct experience and credibility...I think we've known for a while we need a bigger sales team and more customers support. How do you grow those, and what's the right rate? As an observer, those are all important."

It's not just cloud where Google is extending a friendly hand to other companies. Google Cloud announced partnerships with seven open source software based companies, with a new scheme that includes revenue-sharing and mutual customer support services.

What's more, Google Cloud is embracing some key Microsoft services. On Wednesday, Google Cloud announced that customers will be able to run two Microsoft services on its cloud: the database server Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Active Directory, which lets helps manage users and devices on a network.

Read:Yet another head of cloud leaves SAP as CEO Bill McDermott pursues the cloud strategy that Oracle refuses to try

Daniel Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, says that Google taking a multi-cloud strategy puts it in a good position, but there's more work to be done to prove that it's serious about following through.

"I think it's more emphasis on partnerships and the multi-cloud approach," Ives told Business Insider. "That continues to be a big focus for Kurian. They need to talk the talk in this industry as they go against enterprise demons. He's trying to hit a tone. It's a pivotal time to be successful in this cloud arms race."

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8 replies (most recent on top)

Right on - having lost interest in running oracle, LE should have formally retired long ago - but as usual his ego got in the way. As for why he allowed TK to hang around and cause so much havoc? Well, no competent exec would have agreed to work for Turd and have LE meddle in every technical decision. It all boils down to LE’s inability to let go and allow competent people to run the place, which would have made him much, much richer - see MSFT - but of course would have grated on his overblown and fragile ego to see somebody else succeed where he has failed. So LE and Oracle are declining together - the cycle of life.

TK was indecisive, horrible at communicating, and did not give a hoot about any customer who wasn't currently in the sales pipeline. He was simply not cut out for leadership of any kind. But let's be honest. LE is the one that owns this failure. Sure, TK was in way over his head, but who allowed that to happen? Who spent all their time thinking about boats and tennis while TK built up a mountain of technical debt that we'll probably never be able to crawl out from? LE spent the past decade asleep at the wheel. I see little reason to believe he's woken up. TK was nothing more than a (very bad) symptom of our real problems. Until we address the root cause, Oracle has no hope of returning to real growth.

Let's be very clear here as TK is getting far too much credit.

Oracle's Cloud is much worse than the competition, so the "play" was to try to at least make money where they could by having database licensing that didn't encourage customers to look elsewhere. Google's Cloud is arguably technically superior to the competition and Anthos offers a way for more customers to experience that difference, so the play is to draw in more customers to a Cloud that actually works. Those are two very different strategies and TK had nothing to do with Google's (it was announced several months ago under the GKE On-prem name).

TK's strategy historically has been based on his ability to make sharp, summarized points convincingly to customers, partners and management while growing his fiefdom and blaming other groups for his failures. Now HD is also joining Google and has a similar pedigree. Oracle didn't lose anything here as the real problem remains -- LE and MH narcissistic approach to dealing with customers and the business. In the meantime, Google Cloud has now been infected by "leaders" who only know the path to failure while lining their own pockets.

Well, let’s not be so modest now shall we, there is always the very elaborate cloud fraud scheme that oracle had perfected. TK knows it inside out and can surely help his new masters generate fictitious cloud revenues using LE approach - would LE file a lawsuit against google claiming theft of intellectual property? LOL!

Other than database which is available on AWS what would Oracle provide that somebody would want on another provider? Certainly not anything developed or acquired during TK’s tenure

It’s a view that oracle doesn’t have the capability to provide - so simple and yet so difficult for oracle - ouch!

Anthos is nothing more than a view to containers. Hardly revolutionary.

A very good article

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TK is executing the playbook that LE wouldn’t let him run with at Oracle

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