Google Buys Bebop And Names Diane Greene To Lead Enterprise Cloud Effort

In an astonishing move, Google said it was acquiring enterprise development platform startup bebop and employing founder, Diane Greene as head of Google’s enterprise cloud services.

Greene with an impressive background as one of the co-founders and a former CEO of VMware. Her company had been operating in silently until today’s acquisition.

Google made the move public in a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai. He said Greene will operate an integrated enterprise cloud business,which combines Google for Work, Cloud Platform, and Google Apps with a consolidated product, engineering, marketing and sales team that was not available before now, Pichai said in the blog post.

While he mentioned a 60 percent Google cloud penetration in the Fortune 500, the company seemed not to have a single enterprise cloud front until now.

R Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research says Greene brings real enterprise experience to the team with her foray into VMware. “Google needed someone who could deliver world class consumer-grade experiences with enterprise-class scale and platform thinking,” Wang told TechCrunch.

Steve Herrod, managing partner with venture capitalist General Catalyst and a former CTO at VMware agreed. “She is up to the task and ultimately changes the game for Google’s cloud front,” Herrod wrote in an email. “The engineering team at bebop were outstanding as well and will add a lot of enterprise DNA to Google,” he added.

Google is one of the earliest cloud companies, and has made great strides with consumers, it is trying to match up with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and IBM in the enterprise.

This is a clear indication that Google wants to put all of them on notice that they are prepared take on platform, infrastructure and software services in the enterprise.

When you mention cloud services, Google is a firm that relishes the word.Google Docs, Google Drive, GMail or Google Calendar; are some of core cloud services that many consumers (including myself) use on a daily basis.

The Chromebook personal computer is a cloud-driven, designed to power all your apps from Google and others in the Chrome browser in-addition to running certain Android apps outside the browser.

Google is already trying to raise the bar in the enterprise with different versions of those tools merged together as Google Apps for Work, the company suffered a set back in July when early Google Apps user GE chose Microsoft Office 365 for its massive 300,000 employee deployment.

Perhaps feeling the effect the loss, Google started a promotion last month where it allows companies having enterprise agreement with a competetor's  product, try Google Apps for Work for free.

Google evidently has the cloud infrastructure to compete effectively with Microsoft, Amazon and others, what it lacks up today is leadership with a clear experience of the enterprise that Greene gives them.