SAN FRANCISCO: Former Oracle Corp product chief Thomas Kurian , a technologist hailing from Bengaluru, is going to head Google Cloud from early next year, the internet giant has announced.

Kurian will replace Diane Greene as head of the Cloud division at Google, Greene said in a blog post on Friday, after a tumultuous year for the business as it fell behind Amazon and Microsoft.

Kurian, who spent 22 years at Oracle and had been a close confidant of its founder Larry Ellison, resigned in September after struggling to expand its cloud business.

Greene, the current CEO of Google Cloud, will continue through January, working with Kurian to ensure a smooth transition and will remain a director on the board of Google’s parent, Alphabet.

Kurian reportedly quit Oracle due to disagreements with executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison over the future of the company as the Cloud business gets highly competitive.

In a statement on Friday, Greene said, “Kurian, a respected technologist and executive, will be joining Google Cloud on November 26 and transitioning into the leadership role in early 2019.”

Kurian used to supervise Cloud development at Oracle, the world’s second-largest software maker. But he had a difficult time transitioning the company to Cloud computing and Oracle struggled to gain much traction against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. He’ll now have a chance to try it again.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “We’re really excited to welcome Thomas, whose product vision, customer focus, and deep expertise will be a huge asset to our growing Cloud business.”

Kurian said he “is excited to join the fantastic Google Cloud team at this important and promising time.”

“I’m looking forward to building on the success of recent years as it enters its next phase of growth,” he added.

A member of Oracle’s executive committee for 13 years, Kurian led a 35,000-people software development team in 32 countries with an R&D budget of $4 billion.

His twin brother, George Kurian, is CEO of Californiabased Hybrid Cloud data services and data management company NetApp.

