Tag: Thomas Kurian

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Google closes $2.6B Looker acquisition

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is part of the Google Cloud Platform.

While Kurian was happy to announce that Looker was officially part of the Google family, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue to support multiple cloud vendors beyond Google.

“Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.

Google continues to preach multi-cloud approach with Looker acquisition

As is typical in a deal like this, Looker CEO Frank Bien sees the much larger Google giving his company the resources to grow much faster than it could have on its own. “Joining Google Cloud provides us better reach, strengthens our resources, and brings together some of the best minds in both analytics and cloud infrastructure to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners. The mission that we undertook seven years ago as Looker takes a significant step forward beginning today,” Bien wrote in his post.

At the time the deal was announced in June, the company shared a slide, which showed where Looker fits in what they call their “Smart Analytics Platform,” which provides ways to process, understand, analyze and visualize data. Looker fills in a spot in the visualization stack while continuing to support other clouds.

Slide: Google

Looker was founded in 2011 and raised more than $280 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors included Redpoint, Meritech Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins, CapitalG and PremjiInvest. The last deal before the acquisition was a $103 million Series E investment on a $1.6 billion valuation in December 2018.

Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion

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Google Cloud makes strides but still has a long way to go

In earnings reported this week, Alphabet announced that Google Cloud generated a robust $2.61 billion for the quarter, a number that includes revenue from both Google Cloud Platform and G Suite.

That puts the division on a nice little run rate of $10.44 billion. It feels like a lot until you consider that Microsoft had a combined software and infrastructure cloud revenue run rate of $12.5 billion in its most recent report, while AWS reported almost $10 billion for the quarter. While Google is not even close to these rivals, it’s picking up some much-needed steam.

As Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, points out, crossing the $10 billion run rate mark is a rite of passage. “Ten billion dollars is the new mark for IaaS players, effectively the unicorn rating for them. And revenue/size matter, as the cloud business is an economies of scale business,” Mueller told TechCrunch.

Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

More enterprise, please

When Thomas Kurian came on board last year after more than two decades at Oracle to replace Diane Greene as head of Google Cloud, prevailing wisdom suggested that he was hired to help shift the division’s focus firmly to the enterprise. The move appears to be working.

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Google takes on AWS and Azure in India with Airtel cloud deal

Google has inked a deal with India’s third-largest telecom operator as the American giant looks to grow its cloud customer base in the key overseas market that is increasingly emerging as a new cloud battleground for AWS and Microsoft .

Google Cloud announced on Monday that the new partnership, effective starting today, enables Airtel to offer G Suite to small and medium-sized businesses as part of the telco’s ICT portfolio.

Airtel, which has amassed over 325 million subscribers in India, said it currently serves 2,500 large businesses and over 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses and startups in the country. The companies did not share details of their financial arrangement.

In a statement, Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud, said, “the combination of G Suite’s collaboration and productivity tools with Airtel’s digital business offerings will help accelerate digital innovations for thousands of Indian businesses.”

The move follows Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom operator, striking a similar deal with Microsoft to sell cloud services to small businesses. The two announced a 10-year partnership in August last year to “serve millions of customers.”

AWS, which leads the cloud market, interestingly does not maintain any similar deals with a telecom operator — though it did in the past. Deals with carriers, which were very common a decade ago as tech giants looked to acquire new users in India, illustrates the phase of the cloud adoption in the nation.

Nearly half a billion people in India came online last decade. And slowly, small businesses and merchants are also beginning to use digital tools, storage services, and accept online payments. According to a report by lobby group Nasscom, India’s cloud market is estimated to be worth more than $7 billion in three years.

Like in many other markets, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are locked in an intense battle to win cloud customers in India. All of them offer near identical features and are often willing to pay out a potential client’s remainder credit to the rival to convince them to switch, industry executives have told TechCrunch.

The three companies have also launched a range of tools and conducted training in India in recent years to help mom-and-pop stores easily build presence on the web. Last week, Amazon said it was investing $1 billion into its India operations to help about 10 million merchants come online.

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Smart Compose is coming to Google Docs

At its Cloud Next event in London, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian today announced that Smart Compose, the AI-powered feature that currently tries to complete phrases and sentences for you in Gmail, is also coming to G Suite’s Google Docs soon. For now, though, your G Suite admin has to sign up for the beta to try it  and it’s only available in English.

Google says in total, Smart Compose in Gmail already saves people from typing about 2 billion characters per week. At least in my own experience, it also works surprisingly well and has only gotten better since launch (as one would expect from a product that learns from the individual and collective behavior of its users). It remains to be seen how well this same technique works for longer texts, but even longer documents are often quite formulaic, so the algorithm should still work quite well there, too.

Google first announced Smart Compose in May 2018, as part of its I/O developer conference. It builds upon the same machine learning technology Google developed for its Smart Reply feature. The company then rolled out Smart Compose to all G Suite and private Gmail users, starting in July 2018, and later added support for mobile, too.

Google’s Smart Compose is now ready to write emails for G Suite users

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Google picks up Microsoft veteran, Javier Soltero, to head G Suite

Google has hired Microsoft’s former Cortana and Outlook VP, Javier Soltero, to head up its productivity and collaboration bundle, G Suite — which includes consumer and business tools such as Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Google Docs and Sheets.

He tweeted the news yesterday, writing: “The opportunity to work with this team on products that have such a profound impact on the lives of people around the world is a real and rare privilege.”

 

Soltero joined Microsoft five years ago, after the company shelling out $200M to acquire his mobile email application, Acompli — staying until late last year.

His LinkedIn profile now lists him as vice president of G Suite, starting October 2019.

Soltero will report to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian — who replaced Dianne Green when she stepped down from the role last year — per a company email reported by CNBC.

Previously, Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan — now SVP for its Advertising and Commerce products — was in charge of the productivity bundle, as VP of Google Apps and Google Cloud. But Mountain View has created a dedicated VP role for G Suite. Presumably to woo Soltero into his next major industry move — and into competing directly with his former employer.

The move looks intended to dial up focus on the Office giant, in response to Microsoft’s ongoing push to shift users from single purchase versions of flagship productivity products to subscription-based cloud versions, like Office 365.

This summer Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that its cloud business unit had an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, up from $4BN reported in early 2018, though still lagging Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

He added that Google planned to triple the size of its cloud sales force over the next few years.

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Google Cloud’s run rate is now over $8B

It’s been a while since Google last shared any fundamental financial data about its cloud business. In today’s earnings call, though, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who recently installed former SAP exec Thomas Kurian as the new head of Google Cloud, announced that this business unit now has an $8 billion annual revenue run rate. That’s up from the $4 billion the company reported in early 2018.

While Google often felt like an also-ran in the cloud wars, it’s clearly starting to make up some ground. “Other cloud providers would have you believe that no one is using Google, which is not true,” Kurian told me when I talked to him earlier this year. Now he can put some numbers behind this claim.

To put that into perspective, AWSs run rate topped $30 billion last quarter while Microsoft Azure is somewhere around $11 billion, though concrete numbers are hard to come by.

“Q2 was another strong quarter for Google Cloud, which reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion and continues to grow at a significant pace,” Pichai said. “Customers are choosing Google Cloud for a variety of reasons: reliability and uptime are critical. Retailers like Lowes are leveraging the cloud as one of the important tools to transform their customer experience and supply chain.”

Pichai also noted that customers want the flexibility to move to the cloud in their own way, something that some of Google’s competitors — and especially Microsoft — focused on before Google got to this point. With Anthos and other initiatives, the company is now catching up, though.

Unsurprisingly, Pichai also stressed Google’s role in pushing AI forward at a time when enterprises are starting to look at how they can make use of this technology.

Google Cloud’s new CEO on gaining customers, startups, supporting open source and more

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Chronicle, X’s security moonshot, moves to Google Cloud

Google Cloud today announced that Chronicle, the enterprise security company Google’s parent company Alphabet incubated under its X “moonshot factory,” is moving to Google Cloud and becoming part of Google’s security portfolio.

Chronicle officially launched out of X in January 2018, when it became an independent company under the Alphabet umbrella. Stephen Gillett, who was previously the COO of security company Symantec, became its CEO.

Spinning out Chronicle instead of bringing it to Google Cloud always seemed like an odd move. It was likely meant to see if its products, including malware and virus scanning service VirusTotal and its enterprise security intelligence and analytics platform, could stand on their own. It’s unclear how well Chronicle did in the market, but given Google’s focus on growing its cloud business, it seems like a logical move to now integrate Chronicle into Google Cloud.

“Chronicle’s products and engineering team complement what Google Cloud offers,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian writes today, “Chronicle’s VirusTotal malware intelligence services will be a powerful addition to the pool of threat data informing Google Cloud offerings, and will continue to support applications running on our platforms.”

He also notes that the team saw that both Chronicle and Google Cloud were already on a trajectory that saw them converge on the same kind of solutions.

He expects to see a full integration of Chronicle’s security tools into Google Cloud by this fall.

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Google continues to preach multi-cloud approach with Looker acquisition

When Google announced it was buying Looker yesterday morning for $2.6 billion, you couldn’t blame some of the company’s 1600 customers if they worried a bit if Looker would continue its multi-cloud approach, but Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian made clear the company will continue to support an open approach to its latest purchase when it joins the fold later this year.

It’s consistent with the messaging from Google Next, the company’s cloud conference in April. It was looking to portray itself as the more open cloud. It was going to be friendlier to open source projects, running them directly on Google Cloud. It was going to provide a way to manage your workloads wherever they live with Anthos.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that in a multi-cloud world, Looker represented one of the best choices, and that could be why Google went after it. “Looker’s strengths include its centralized data-modeling and governance, which promotes consistency and reuse. It runs on top of modern cloud databases including Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake,” Wang told TechCrunch. He added, “They wanted to acquire a tool that is as easy to use as Microsoft Power BI and as deep as Tableau.”

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, also see this deal as part of consistent multi-cloud message from Google. “I do think it is in alignment with its latest strategy outlined at Google Next. It has talked about rich analytics tools that could pull data from disparate sources,” he said.

Kurian pushing the multi-cloud message

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, who took over from Diane Greene at the end of last year, was careful to emphasize the company’s commitment to multi-cloud and multi-database support in comments to media and analysts yesterday. “We first want to reiterate, we’re very committed to maintaining local support for other clouds, as well as to serve data from multiple databases because customers want a single analytics foundation for their organization, and they want to be able to in the analytics foundation, look at data from multiple data sources. So we’re very committed to that,” Kurian said yesterday.

From a broader customer perspective, Kurian sees Looker providing customers with a single way to access and visualize data. “One of the things that is challenging for organizations in operationalizing business intelligence, that we feel that Looker has done really well, is it gives you a single place to model your data, define your data definitions — like what’s revenue, who’s a gold customer or how many servers tickets are open — and allows you then to blend data across individual data silos, so that as an organization, you’re working off a consistent set of metrics,” Kurian explained.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Looker CEO Frank Bien sought to ease concerns that the company might move away from the multi-cloud, multi-database support. “For customers and partners, it’s important to know that today’s announcement solidifies ours as well as Google Cloud’s commitment to multi-cloud. Looker customers can expect continuing support of all cloud databases like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and more,” Bien wrote in the post.

No anti-trust concerns

Kurian also emphasized that this deal shouldn’t attract the attention of anti-trust regulators, who have been sniffing around the big tech companies like Google/Alphabet, Apple and Amazon as of late. “We’re not buying any data along with this transaction. So it does not introduce any concentration risk in terms of concentrating data. Secondly, there are a large number of analytic tools in the market. So by just acquiring Looker, we’re not further concentrating the market in any sense. And lastly, all the other cloud players also have their own analytic tools. So it represents a further strengthening of our competitive position relative to the other players in the market,” he explained. Not to mention its pledge to uphold the multi-cloud and multi-database support, which should show it is not doing this strictly to benefit Google or to draw customers specifically to GCP.

Just this week, the company announced a partnership with Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse startup that has raised almost a billion dollars, to run on Google Cloud Platform. It already runs AWS and Microsoft Azure. In fact, Wang suggested that Snowflake could be next on Google’s radar as it tries to build a multi-cloud soup-to-nuts analytics offering.

Regardless, with Looker the company has a data analytics tool to complement its data processing tools, and together the two companies should provide a fairly comprehensive data solution. If they truly keep it multi, cloud, that should keep current customers happy, especially those who work with tools outside of the Google Cloud ecosystem or simply want to maintain their flexibility.

Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion

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Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion

Google made a big splash this morning when it announced it’s going to acquire Looker, a hot analytics startup that’s raised over $280 million. It’s paying $2.6 billion for the privilege and adding the company to Google Cloud.

Thomas Kurian, the man who was handed the reigns to Google Cloud at the end of last year see the crucial role data plays today for organizations, especially as they move to the cloud. “The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation,” Kurian said in a statement.

Google Cloud has been mired in third place in the cloud infrastructure market, and grabbing Looker gives it an analytics company with a solid track record. The last time I spoke to Looker it was grabbing a hefty $103 million in funding on a $1.6 billion valuation. Today’s price is nice even billion over that.

As I wrote at the time, Looker’s CEO Frank Bien wasn’t all that interested in bragging about valuations though. “He reported that the company has 1,600 customers now and just crossed the $100 million revenue run rate, a significant milestone for any enterprise SaaS company. What’s more, Bien reports revenue is still growing 70 percent year over year, so there’s plenty of room to keep this going.”

Perhaps, it’s not a coincidence that Google went after Looker as the two companies had a strong existing partnership and 350 common customers, according to Google.

Per usual this deal is going to be subject to regulatory approval, but the deal is expected to close later this year if all goes well.

Looker snags $103 million investment on $1.6 billion valuation

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Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

Salil Deshpande Contributor
Salil Deshpande serves as the managing director of Bain Capital Ventures. He focuses on infrastructure software and open source.
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Amazon’s behavior toward open source combined with lack of leadership from industry associations such as the Open Source Initiative (OSI) will stifle open-source innovation and make commercial open source less viable.

The result will be more software becoming proprietary and closed-source to protect itself against AWS, widespread license proliferation (a dozen companies changed their licenses in 2018) and open-source licenses giving way to a new category of licenses, called source-available licenses.

Don’t get me wrong — there will still be open source, lots and lots of it. But authors of open-source infrastructure software will put their interesting features in their “enterprise” versions if we as an industry cannot solve the Amazon problem.

Unfortunately, the dark cloud on the horizon I wrote about back in November has drifted closer. Amazon has exhibited three particularly offensive and aggressive behaviors toward open source:

  • It takes open-source code produced by others, runs it as a commercial service and gives nothing back to the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open source, thereby intercepting the monetization of the open source.
  • It forks projects and forcibly wrestles control away from the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open-source projects, as it did in the case of Elasticsearch.
  • It hijacks open-source APIs and places them on top of its own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open-source project to its own proprietary solution, as it did with the MongoDB APIs.

Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow. But these behaviors and their undesirable results could be curbed if industry associations created standard open-source licenses that allowed authors of open-source software to express a simple concept:

“I do not want my open-source code run as a commercial service.”

Leadership often comes from unexpected sources.

But the OSI, an organization that opines on the open-sourceness of licenses, is an ineffective wonk tank that refuses to acknowledge the problem and insists that unless Amazon has the “freedom” to take your code, run it as a commercial service and give nothing back to you, your code is not “open source.” The OSI believes it owns the definition of open source and refuses to update the definition of open source, which is short-sighted and dangerous.

To illustrate: The Server Side Public License (SSPL) — the license proposal spearheaded by MongoDB — was patterned exactly after the Gnu General Public License (GPL) and the Affero General Public License (AGPL). SSPL is a perfectly serviceable open-source license, and like GPL and AGPL, rather than prohibit software from being run as a service, SSPL requires that you open-source all programs that you use to make the software available as a service.

A months-long comical debate ensued after SSPL was proposed as an open-source license candidate to OSI, after which OSI made its premeditated opinion official, that SSPL is not an open-source license, even though GPL and AGPL are open source. In its myopia, the OSI forgot to be consistent: If SSPL is not open source, then GPL and AGPL should not be either. MongoDB will continue to use SSPL anyway, but it just won’t be called “open source” because OSI says that it owns the definition of “open source” and it can’t be called that. Great.

Source-available licenses

Is it inevitable that the combination of Amazon’s behavior and this lack of industry leadership will stifle open-source innovation and make commercial open source less viable? Should we just live with either more software becoming proprietary and closed-source to protect itself against AWS, or with widespread license proliferation?

We’ve already seen plenty of license proliferation. MongoDB SSPL, Confluent Community License (CCL), Timescale License (TSL), Redis Source Available License (RSAL), Neo4J Commons Clause, Cockroach Community License (CCL), Dgraph (now using Cockroach Community License), Elastic License, Sourcegraph Fair SourceLicense, MariaDB Business Source License (BSL)… and many more.

The trend is toward “source-available” licensing rather than “open-source” licensing because source-available licenses, uncontaminated by the myopia of open source industry associations, do not require that Amazon have the “freedom” to take your code, run it as a commercial service and give nothing back to you.

To that end, a group of open-source lawyers led by Heather Meeker, a respected and undisputed leader on technology and open-source law who worked on both Commons Clause and SSPL, will soon open a suite of “source-available” licenses for community comment.

The suite of source-available licenses is expected to provide authors of open-source software with a number of methods to address the growing threat from cloud infrastructure providers. The suite will provide short plain-language source-available licenses; standardize patterns in recently adopted source-available licenses; and allow users and companies to mix and match limitations you want to impose (e.g. non-commercial use only, or value add only, or no SaaS use, or whatever else). I believe these frameworks will be a smart alternative to open source, as the OSI refuses to provide leadership in solving the Amazon problem.

AWS and anti-competitive behavior

More broadly, it is clear to most industry observers that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive. Unless something changes, calls for anti-trust action against both Amazon and AWS are inevitable, even if AWS is divested from Amazon. That issue is broader than just open source.

Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational.

Within open source, if Amazon isn’t breaking any laws today, then licenses to prevent or curb their behavior are critical. And lack of leadership from the open-source industry associations that squat on the term “open source” means that source-available licenses are the most viable solution to curb such behavior. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Leadership often comes from unexpected sources. There are promising signs that other cloud infrastructure providers are becoming true allies to the open-source community. Take Google, for example. The major announcements at Google Cloud Next in April 2019 were dramatic and encouraging. The company announced partnerships with Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs — companies most affected by Amazon’s behavior.

Google Cloud’s new CEO Thomas Kurian’s remarks echoed what I had been saying for the last year.

Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch wrote:

Google is taking a very different approach to open source than some of its competitors, and especially AWS. … “The most important thing is that we believe that the platforms that win in the end are those that enable rather than destroy ecosystems. We really fundamentally believe that,” [Kurian] told me. “Any platform that wins in the end is always about fostering rather than shutting down an ecosystem. If you look at open-source companies, we think they work hard to build technology and enable developers to use it.”

It’s smart for Google to align with these commercial open-source players — AWS is beating Google in the cloud wars and giving best-of-breed commercial open-source products first-class status on Google’s cloud will help Google win more enterprise customers.

Perhaps more importantly, the stance and language on how ecosystems thrive is incredibly encouraging.

Disclosures: The author has invested in numerous open companies affected by the behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, indirectly owns shares of Amazon and, apart from any abuse of open source or anti-competitive behavior, is a big fan of Amazon.