Sundar Pichai And Thomas Kurian's 8 Boldest Statements At Google Cloud Next

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian took center stage at Google Cloud Next to elaborate on the company's vision of building an enterprise cloud business that leans heavily on open technologies.

Google CEOs Speak

Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced newly minted Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian to his first Google audience Tuesday at the cloud provider's Next conference in San Francisco.

During the opening day keynote, the two CEOs elaborated on Google's vision for building an enterprise cloud business that leans heavily on open technologies to enable multi-cloud deployments for its growing base of large customers.

Both Pichai and Kurian took turns introducing capabilities of the product that will drive that charge, called Anthos. A rebrand of Google Cloud Services, unveiled at last year's Next conference, Google surprised the audience by revealing an upgrade with the Anthos general release that will allow Google customers to build and manage apps deployed not only in corporate data centers, but across its public cloud rivals.

Click through the slideshow to see some of their boldest statements from the keynote.

The ‘Freedom To Choose The Right Cloud Partner’: Pichai Introduces Anthos

Last year, we announced Google Cloud Services Platform, to manage Kubernetes both on-prem and in Google cloud.

But it still left one customer problem unsolved. It didn't make it easy for you to span multiple cloud providers. Anthos, based on Kubernetes, it runs on-premises, but also supports multi-and hybrid-cloud environments, and is fully managed by Google.

It brings together the simplicity of open source platforms, our deep technical expertise, and the freedom to choose the right cloud partner for your job.

It lets you write once and run your jobs anywhere—in our cloud, in your data center, or on other cloud providers. It gives you the flexibility to move on-prem apps to the cloud when you're ready and it allows you to keep using the technologies you're already using while improving security.

Pichai On ‘Industry Standard’ Kubernetes

It's an incredible time to be developing cloud technology and using it to solve problems.

Today, most of the world's enterprise computing still happens on premise. It hasn't moved to the cloud yet because the path forward is complex and daunting and full of difficult decisions.

We have faced similar challenges as a company in our own business. The massive resource requirements of our own cloud services, be it Search, Maps and Gmail, demanded every ounce of computing power from our servers.

But we needed to maintain flexibility to react to the shifting user demands and we really wanted to be easy to ship between jobs. This led to our early experimentation with containers, and we developed own internal cluster management tool, Borg, and as we developed Google Cloud, we wanted everyone to be able to use Borg for their computing needs.

And the result was our open source effort, Kubernetes. Today it is the industry standard for running and managing containers.

Kurian on Google Cloud's ‘Clear Vision’

We at Google Cloud have a very clear vision of what we want to offer customers in a number of industries who are going through digital transformation.

We want to give them globally scaled, distributed, secure infrastructure; digital transformation platform that helps people build innovative digital transformation solutions; and then industry specific capabilities for digital transformation in a number of industries.

Kurian On Anthos

It came from our listening to customers who wanted three important things from their cloud providers.

First, the ability to have a technology stack they could run in their data center next to enterprise workloads that they couldn't yet move to the cloud. Hybrid cloud.

Second, a single programming model that gave them choice and flexibility to move workloads to both Google Cloud as well as other providers without any change.

Third, a platform that allows them to operate this infrastructure without complexity, and to secure and manage across multiple clouds in a single, consistent way.

Pichai On ‘Tremendous Leader’ Kurian

Thomas has only been leading Google Cloud for about 10 weeks now. But many of you probably know him from more than two decades of experience serving enterprise customers. In his short time at Google, he's already met with hundreds of customers and partners. He's a tremendous leader with a powerful vision.

Kurian Grateful For Diane Greene’s Leadership

A word of thanks to Diane Greene, who spent so many years helping build Google Cloud. She retired earlier this year and I'm very grateful for her leadership of Google Cloud for so many years.

Kurian On ‘Massively Expanding’ Go-To-Market Organization

We at Google Cloud want to be the best strategic partner to organizations that are choosing their digital transformation journey. And we believe we can do that in two important ways.

First way is bringing expertise to help you on that journey.

And the second, to be the easiest cloud provider to do business with.

To help you on that journey, we're massively expanding our go-to-market organization. Not just in sales people, but with technical specialists who deeply understand technology and industries.

Kurian On Partners

To make it easy for our customers to do business with us, we're introducing a variety of new things: simplified pricing, easier contracting, co-innovation frameworks where we can work with you and partners, and we recognize partners are very, very important to Google, and we're broadening our partner reach and introducing a number of new enhancements in our partner program.

We're very grateful to all of you, our partners, who've done so much to help us further our mission to being successful as a digital transformation provider, and we've seen a 4x growth in partner certifications this last year, a 4x growth in developer certifications, and a 6x growth in developer learning hours.