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It wasn’t until Google became Alphabet that we got a glimpse about how serious Google was about the enterprise.
Sure Google Docs was — and is — a hit at some companies, and Google Drive is home to a lot of personal and business files.
But how many times have we heard Google Cloud mentioned in the same sentence as Amazon and Azure? Not many.
Going Greene
Yet in November when Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced he had hired VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene to head up the company’s cloud business, it became clear that he intended to give Amazon and Microsoft (Azure) a run for their money.
After all, Greene knows the enterprise. Not only that, but as the founder of the then startup she has personally called on corporate CEOs and convinced them to put their businesses into her hands.
Virtualization was brand new at the time and she had a paradigm shifting idea to sell and she succeeded, brilliantly.
For most of 2015 it looked like Greene was going to try it again, this time with bebop, a startup she co-founded with her husband, Stanford professor Mendel Rosenblum.
But we’ll never know how that might have played out because Google acquired bebop at the same time that it hired Greene.
Big Bucks
We didn’t know what Google paid for the acquisition until this week.
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The price tag? A hefty $380 million, which is quite a bit to pay for a startup that’s still operating in stealth mode.
The price of the acquisition, which initially looked like an acquihire, seems to suggest that there’s some valuable technology involved as well.
After all, Greene could have just quit and joined Google. But if she wanted to take what bebop had built with her, a sale was must because according to Fortune, Andreesen Horowitz was also an investor in the startup.
Greene, according to an Alphabet’s SEC filing made public this week, will donate her portion of the proceeds to a “donor advised charity.”
Though we haven’t been able to verify how many of bebop’s employees have landed at Google, it is worth noting that some have, including Bogomil Balkansky, who’s now a vice president there.
What’s yet to be seen as how the mix of Google’s business cloud portfolio, bebop’s assets and Greene will change the game in the enterprise cloud marketplace. It should be interesting.
