Carl Schachter, who had been vice president of Google Cloud, is leaving the company, a Google spokeswoman confirmed early Thursday. She had no other comment.
Schachter joined the Internet search giant in 2012 from Salesforce.com (CRM), according to his LinkedIn profile. Initially he worked on Google for Work, formerly the overall brand for Google applications and devices. It is now part of the Google Cloud group. Schachter was promoted to head Google Cloud’s sales effort two years ago.
He was already at the company when Diane Greene was named senior vice president in charge of Google Cloud’s push into larger business accounts. News of Schachter’s departure was first reported by The Information.
According to that story, there was a sales reorganization earlier this year in which Schachter got responsibility for North America sales while another executive took on Europe and the Middle East.
Google is generally viewed as the third largest public cloud provider after Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft. Greene, who co-founded VMware (VMW), and Brian Stevens, a former executive from Red Hat (RHT), joined the company over the past few years to help push Google’s cloud into enterprise accounts.
For more on Diane Greene’s plan for Google Cloud Platform, watch:
No one doubts Google’s ability to run massive cloud data centers efficiently, but it must do better at providing the types of customer hand-holding and sales support that big buyers of technology have come to expect from suppliers like Microsoft and IBM (IBM), which also offers public cloud services.
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For Google, the public cloud, in which one company amasses and runs giant pools of servers, storage, and networking and then sells those computing services to customers, is a big departure from its core Internet search and ad business. But it is banking that its experience in running those massive businesses gives it the experience it needs to run tons of computing power for other companies.
It is expected to announce more big customers and services to attract them at a Google Next event in San Francisco in March.
