Google Cloud hires former AWS executive to spearhead partnerships in India

Google Cloud has hired Amitabh Jacob, a former executive at cloud computing rival Amazon Web Services (AWS), to oversee its partnerships and alliances in India.

Jacob will be responsible for leading the cloud firm’s overall route-to-market plan in the region, Google Cloud said in a statement. He will chart out strategies to engage with resellers, tech partners, managed service providers and distribution partners.

Based out of Bengaluru, his key responsibilities will also include increasing channel capacity and expanding the reach of Google Cloud products and solutions in the Indian market.

“India is a key growth market for Google Cloud, and Amitabh is joining us at an exciting time,” said Ash Willis, Google Cloud’s head of cloud partnerships and alliances for Asia-Pacific and Japan. “His experience leading channel organisations will be a tremendous asset for our business, our partners and our customers.”

Jacob said that only 10% of global workloads were estimated to be in the cloud and there is huge potential with regard to growth in adoption.

At AWS, he was the head of partnerships and alliances and was involved in building and scaling Amazon cloud partnerships in the region.

Jacob worked with Amazon for nearly three years. Before that, he had stints at Microsoft India, Symantec, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Google Cloud has been beefing up its top leadership of late in a bid catch up with market leaders AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. In November, it appointed former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian as its chief executive officer.

Google also recently announced that its cloud platform could be used on-premises. It released a beta version of the kubernetes-based platform, giving organisations the ability to run Google Cloud workloads on their own infrastructure.