Diane Greene, who was hired three years ago to build Google’s cloud-computing business, is being replaced in that job by former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian.
Google said on Friday that Kurian is joining Google Cloud on Nov. 26, and will take over the leadership role in early 2019. Greene will remain CEO of the business until then.
It’s been a rocky tenure for Greene, who brought serious enterprise chops to Google, having previously co-founded and run VMware. She’s staffed up the enterprise sales team and won business from the likes of Spotify and Snap, but Google has failed to eat into Amazon‘s massive lead in the market, and Microsoft has clearly established itself in second place.
Greene, a director of Google parent company Alphabet since 2012, is staying on the board.
Kurian spent more than two decades at Oracle, rising to the level of president of product development. In September he said he was taking “extended time off” in an email to employees, but he resigned before the end of the month.
Greene wrote in a blog post on Friday that she, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure, all interviewed Kurian for the job. Hölzle originally recruited Greene to the job, which she obtained when Google acquired her previous start-up Bebop for $380 million.
“When I joined Google full-time to run Cloud in December 2015, I told my family and friends that it would be for two years,” Greene wrote. “Now, after an unbelievably stimulating and productive three years, it’s time to turn to the passions I’ve long had around mentoring and education.”
Alphabet raised eyebrows in its earnings call last month, when the company gave less information than it had in the past on the size and growth rate of the cloud unit.
In February, Pichai told analysts that the total cloud business, which includes applications for email, word processing and spreadsheets as well as public cloud infrastructure, was generating more than $1 billion in revenue per quarter and said that, based on publicly available data from 2017, was likely growing faster than any of its rivals.
But when asked for an update in October, Pichai neglected to offer specifics, saying only that he’s seeing “strong indicators” that the investment is paying off and that enterprise wins “turn into larger revenue deals over time.”
Some analysts were unimpressed.
“There were notably no metrics in relation to the cloud business, which we view as not an overly encouraging sign,” analysts from Atlantic Equities wrote in a report after the earnings report.
WATCH: Greene says Google’s cloud is growing faster than any other
