Background: Two Enterprise Veterans Take the Helm

When Google Cloud appointed Rob Enslin as President of Global Customer Operations and Thomas Kurian as CEO, both within a short window, the moves signalled something deliberate. Enslin had spent 27 years at SAP; Kurian had spent 22 years at Oracle. These are not cloud-native executives — they are enterprise software veterans who understand procurement cycles, C-suite priorities, long-term contracts, and the difference between a technology pitch and a business case.

The appointments prompted scepticism in some quarters. AWS and Azure had established dominant market positions, and observers questioned whether Google Cloud Platform (GCP) could realistically close that gap. Enslin and Kurian’s answer, as articulated in this interview, is that GCP does not intend to win purely on infrastructure parity. It intends to win on differentiated, data-driven business outcomes.

The Core Message: Bring Google Your Hardest Problems

Asked what single message he would deliver to enterprise buyers, Enslin was direct:

We are very good at solving the world’s biggest, complex problems. Bring your complex problems to Google Cloud, and we’ll solve them with you.

That framing is deliberate. Rather than competing feature-by-feature on compute pricing or managed Kubernetes offerings, GCP is positioning itself as the vendor that applies Google-scale data intelligence to genuinely hard enterprise problems: risk modelling, real-time analytics across petabyte-scale datasets, AI-driven operational decisions.

On why he left SAP after nearly three decades, Enslin explained:

I felt that there was an opportunity for me to do something really different in the industry. What drove me was the opportunity to build a significant presence in the cloud, with Google’s backing, and with the fabulous engineering talent that we have here. And to build applications that went past just transaction-based applications — but truly have the ability to apply intelligence to massive amounts of data. Google has knowledge of vast tracts of the Internet, and how to operate in that space. Bringing many of the AI and ML technologies, for which Google is well known, to the market. I think we will be able to provide highly differentiated applications.

Moving Away from Technical Solutions Toward Business Solutions

A recurring theme from Google Cloud Next 2019 — GCP’s annual customer conference held in San Francisco — was the deliberate shift in audience. The event was business-led and C-suite focused rather than developer-centric. Two announcements in particular illustrated the strategic direction:

• Anthos: A software layer enabling enterprises to deploy and manage applications consistently across any cloud provider or on-premises environment. The product addressed the enterprise demand for multi-cloud flexibility rather than locking buyers into a single infrastructure provider.
• Open-source data ecosystem integrations: Google Cloud brought partners including MongoDB and DataStax into the GCP environment with tighter technical integrations, unified billing, and shared support — reducing the operational friction of running those workloads on GCP.

GCP also reorganised its go-to-market structure around industry verticals — including retail, financial services, media, manufacturing, and public sector — reflecting the recognition that enterprise buyers respond better to industry-specific value propositions than to horizontal platform pitches.

Enslin pointed to real-world deployments as evidence that the data-at-scale proposition is already delivering:

I really, truly believe that because of Google’s knowledge of how to deal with data at scale, we can offer something different. Some of the things we do with HSBC, for instance, are just phenomenal — in terms of getting hundreds of petabytes of information to do risk assessments in split seconds, or nanoseconds, versus hours and days. Those are the kinds of things that are extremely disruptive and give companies and industries an opportunity to actually change the game.

It’s really hard to do that with transaction-based systems of record. Yet we can be disruptive with systems of record and with data, like we are doing in companies such as HSBC, Target, Macy’s, and so on.

But you are 100% right. To differentiate ourselves in the market we need to take the technology toolsets we have around big data, smarter analytics, AI and ML, and build solutions to truly differentiate ourselves.

What Keeps Enslin Up at Night: Execution at Speed

Enslin was candid about the internal challenges facing GCP’s enterprise ambitions. The strategic intent is clear; the execution difficulty lies in translating Google’s technical capabilities into packaged solutions that business buyers — not just engineers — can evaluate, procure, and justify to a board.

We are focused on simplifying how we engage with customers, so it’s much easier to understand. We are simplifying our contracts, our pricing. For me, what keeps me up at night is doing many things at speed and being able to execute at speed. We have tremendous support from Alphabet to support Google Cloud in what we are doing.

It’s just a matter of making sure we can hire in the right markets and bring solution sets to the market as fast as possible, and in a way that customers can understand them — in a way that adds tremendous value to them.

I’m always thinking about how do we package the solution sets so that a business leader understands it. So that it’s not a technical solution, it’s actually a business solution. And the value that they will receive is clear in understanding. We want to bring value to the company. Because if someone makes a significant investment in Google Cloud, we want to make sure that they get a significant return for that.

The reference to simplifying contracts and pricing is notable. A persistent criticism of GCP in 2019 was that its commercial terms were less mature than those of AWS or Azure, which had spent years refining enterprise agreement structures, discount tiers, and support frameworks. Enslin’s background in enterprise sales at SAP directly informs this priority.

Building Out Google’s Enterprise Sales Capability

Beyond strategy, Enslin was making structural changes to GCP’s commercial organisation. He stated his intention to triple the company’s sales headcount. It was also reported — though not confirmed in this interview — that sales compensation structures were shifting toward higher variable pay tied to target attainment, consistent with the models used at SAP and Oracle.

Enslin described the scope of that buildout:

We have really focused on, and what I’m trying to bring, is the enterprise knowledge of how customers want to transact with Google, how they want to be supported by Google. I’m building out Google’s presence on a global basis — we have a huge opportunity in Asia, in markets around the world, where we are, I would say, in our infancy.

In a competitive landscape we will continue to compete, in certain cases, with AWS on infrastructure. But it’s more important that we produce solution sets and go to market in a way that touches the customer base.

The acknowledgement that GCP remains in its infancy in several major geographic markets is a useful reality check. AWS and Azure had years of head start in enterprise account coverage across APAC, EMEA, and Latin America. Closing that gap is a years-long investment in people, partner ecosystems, and local compliance infrastructure.

Assessment: Genuine Opportunity, Significant Execution Risk

GCP’s enterprise strategy in 2019 rested on a coherent hypothesis: that data intelligence, applied to industry-specific problems, is a more defensible and more valuable position than competing on infrastructure price and breadth of services alone. The assets supporting that hypothesis are real — Google’s machine learning research, its global network infrastructure, its experience processing data at a scale few organisations approach.

The execution risks, however, are equally real:

• Enterprise sales culture: Google’s institutional instincts are product- and engineering-led. Building and sustaining a quota-carrying, relationship-driven enterprise sales organisation requires a different kind of management discipline.
• Trust and track record: Enterprise buyers make multi-year infrastructure commitments. GCP’s enterprise track record in 2019 was shorter than AWS’s or Azure’s, making it harder to point to long-standing, mission-critical deployments at scale.
• Internal alignment: Shifting a company whose primary revenue model is advertising toward a services and solutions model for the enterprise requires sustained internal commitment — not just from Alphabet leadership, but from the engineering and product organisations that ultimately build what gets sold.
• Packaging complexity: Converting sophisticated AI and data capabilities into solution packages that a CFO or COO can evaluate is genuinely difficult, and is an area where enterprise software vendors have historically struggled.

Enslin and Kurian represent a serious attempt to address those gaps. Whether Google Cloud can sustain the organisational commitment required — and persuade enterprise buyers that it is a reliable long-term partner — is the central question that the strategy, however well articulated, cannot answer on its own.

Original interview source: diginomica.com. Interview conducted and published August 2019.