VMware Co-Founder Diane Greene to Head Google's Cloud Business

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Google has bought Bebop Technologies, a stealth-mode startup that had been developing a platform for building and maintaining enterprise applications.

Bebop was founded by Diane Greene, a co-founder of VMware and Google board member, who had herself been in stealth-mode for some time.

The acquisition of Bebop (or perhaps “acqui-hire” of Greene) could help Google meet its new ambition of becoming the go-to cloud provider.

Greene and the Bebop team will join Google upon close of the acquisition. She will be heading up a new unit containing all of Google’s cloud businesses, including Google Apps, Google for Work, and Google Cloud Platform.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Inc., said in a blog post, “We think [Bebop] will help many more businesses find great applications, and reap the benefits of cloud computing. Bebop and its stellar team will help us provide integrated cloud products at every level: end-user platforms like Android and Chromebooks, infrastructure and services in Google Cloud Platform, developer frameworks for mobile and enterprise users, and end-user applications like Gmail and Docs.”

Hiring Greene and reorganization of Google's cloud divisions come as the company struggles to catch up with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the cloud infrastructure market. The company has a data center infrastructure of scale that's similar to the two rivals' but has not been able to carve out a market share that would make it a major rival.

But, as Urs Hölzle, Google's VP of technical infrastructure, put it on stage at a conference in San Francisco earlier this week, majority of the world's workloads are not running in the cloud yet. He said he expected Google's cloud services to replicate the success of its Android operating system, outpacing the incumbent leader, and even outgrow its advertising business in terms of revenue.

Hölzle will retain his title, following Greene's appointment and will report to her.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/google-buys-diane-greenes-startup-hires-lead-new-cloud-businesses-unit