Google Cloudの年間売上高が80億ドルを突破
GoogleのSundar Pichai CEOは、親会社のAlphabetの2019年第2四半期の収益発表で、「今後数年間で、営業力を3倍にする」と発表した。Google Cloud reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $8 billion and plans to triple its sales force “over the next few years,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on the parent company Alphabet’s second quarter 2019 earnings call.
The company’s executives typically don’t provide specifics about the cloud business revenue. So the earnings call disclosure was a surprise look into the cloud business’ earnings — and an indicator that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is moving the needle in his mission to take market share from cloud leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
It still has a long way to go. In its quarterly earnings Thursday, Amazon reported a 37% increase in its year-over-year run rate, which hit $33 billion. In other words, AWS’s quarterly revenue of about $8.25 billion equals Google’s annual cloud revenue.
And Microsoft, which reported its earnings last week, banked $11 billion in commercial cloud revenue during the quarter, up 39% on an annualized basis. Azure revenue, which is included in that mix, grew 64% year over year, but the rate of growth continues to slide.
Another of Kurian’s key objectives has been to hire more Google Cloud sales and support staff, and that looks to be well underway according to the earnings call. In addition to announcing plans to triple the cloud salesforce over the next few years, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said the parent company’s headcount was up 4,187 from last quarter.
“In terms of product areas, the most sizable headcount increases were again in cloud for both technical and sales roles,” she added, according to a transcript. “Strategically, we are increasing our hiring in cloud and are incorporating the impact of the Looker acquisition, which we expect to close before the end of this year.”
Under Kurian’s leadership, the company has made a few acquisitions over the last couple months including analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion last month.
During the question and answer session, Pichai credited Kurian with pushing the company’s go-to-market strategy. “Mainly with the realization that we are very competitive when we are there in the banks. And so, focusing on how we can scale up and really build a customer-facing organization,” Pichai said. “So, we are investing heavily, be it in sales, service, partner and operational teams.”
Meanwhile, Alphabet’s total revenue hit $38.9 billion for the quarter, up 19% compared to the second quarter of 2018. And its “other” revenue, which includes cloud, topped $6.18 billion compared to $4.43 billion in the prior year.
