Google Cloud's Thomas Kurian Says Customer Success Is Key

At the Gartner IT Symposium last week, Google CEO Thomas Kurian said Google was marketing its cloud as "a vehicle for transformation," offering high-scale infrastructure with the best reliability and advanced machine learning capabilities. He said Google was gaining traction particularly in financial services, retail, health care, and manufacturing, and was deploying an enterprise sales force and partners in every major market. He said Google was "committed to making the necessary investments" in the cloud.

"Cost is not the central element in the decision," of which cloud customers should use, he said, "Capability is." Kurian said Google wants to give people the ability to compare the cost with other players as well as on-premises and was willing to make long term commitments on price.

Asked for specific ideas where Google could help, Kurian began by singling out contact centers, where he said one in every 4 humans hired ends up being on the job for less than a year. In Google's solution is a software agent that runs on the cloud allows a customer to have a natural language conversation in one of nine different languages and this agent can transcribe the call and hand it over to a human agent to handle the things it can't. Over 95 percent of people calling do not know they are talking to a software agent, and that this can "change the economics" of a contact center.

Thus, he said, it's about solving a business problem, not just taking the cost out. But he reiterated that Google is offering a competitive price and giving long-term price guarantees.

Kurian said his Google Cloud team includes the hardware and infrastructure teams who build data centers but that the software that runs it is part of Google's research group, making the combination a cross-group project.

"Customer empathy," is Google's biggest aspiration for its cloud, Kurian said, saying that Google engineers like looking at large problems and coming up with solutions, so they like "walking a mile in our customers shoes," listening to customer problems, and solving them.

Often customers only tell you what they want within the constraints of what they think is possible, but sometimes they don't understand "the art of the possible."

Asked by Gartner's Daryl Plummer why customers should trust Google compared with its competitors, he said, the others were "fine companies" but talked about the way Google handles data where "you own the data," and can encrypt it and manage the key itself off-site.

Asked about an outage the firm had in June, Kurian talked about finding alternative ways of contacting customers with problems, but according to Gartner data, Google has "the best uptime in the industry."

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He said the company was working with partners in 16 primary geographies, including many different kinds of partners. He noted that Google invented Kubernetes—now the standard for workload management and clustering and talked about how the company knows how to manage it at an extraordinary scale for its own use.

Another market he talked about was how hospitals could use the cloud and search to pull together information from various different sources to help diagnose a patient's underlying problem. "Data is the new digital microscope for doctors," He noted the firm's work with the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic.

Kurian didn't make any big announcements, saying Google Cloud has an event scheduled for next month in London. He pushed the idea of taking its Anthos container management system to the edge, saying if you're not comfortable putting your data in the cloud, we'll have to come to you, rather than you bringing it to us.

He concluded by saying "Customer success is the way you win."