The revolving door at Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been in motion for a while, but it’s now moving faster than ever. So much so that the company’s India arm is being nicknamed Google’s Chief Poacher. Since India as a cloud services market is slated to surpass Japan and Korea, the stakes couldn’t be higher for GCP, a distant third to the market leaders AWS and Microsoft. So it’s not surprising to learn from Pratap, author of today’s story, that GCP is effectively AWS today. HR-wise. It all started with an AWS veteran, joining Google to lead its India business early last year. In fact, our Feb 2021 story had hinted that Bedi would bring in his trusted lieutenants from AWS. It has learnt that if an executive worked with AWS between 2016 and 2020 and is in Bedi’s good books, they have a seat pre-booked at the GCP table. It’s understandable why GCP is luring away AWS people at huge salary hikes—as much as a 90% hike on the base salary when the industry norm is a 30-50% raise. While this is “unsustainable”, GCP isn’t bothered for now. The entire top management of the digital native business (with customers like Flipkart and Meesho) comes from AWS. And this is the kind of customer base - large internet unicorns - that has made AWS the market leader in India and the region. You could turn around and say this is par for the course in a competitive industry. But what if we told you that the trend of bringing in former colleagues, which started with Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian, is tearing Google’s cultural fabric apart? Or at least some claim so.
