Google combines its cloud businesses, puts VMWare co-founder at the helm

Sundar Pichai has taken to the Google for Work blog today to announce that Diane Greene, co-founder of VMWare, is taking lead of a newly-organized group at Google that combines the company’s cloud businesses. Besides the obvious Google Cloud Platform, this move pulls in Google for Work and Google Apps to make one integrated team…

“This new business will bring together product, engineering, marketing and sales and allow us to operate in a much more integrated, coordinated fashion,” Pichai says. “Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way people live and work, and there is no better person to lead this important area.”

In addition, Pichai mentioned that Google has entered into an agreement to acquire a startup that Diane Greene founded in recent years: bebop. In the time that Greene has spent on Google’s Board of Directors (the last three-or-so years), she’s been working to build a company that “makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications.”

Interestingly, this comes right as Google’s senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle stated yesterday that he believes the company’s cloud business will grow to become larger than its advertising business within 5 years. Keep in mind that Google brought in $6.7 billion in advertising revenue last quarter, up 13 percent year over year.

Hölzle wouldn’t offer specifics yesterday on what Google was planning to prove its dedication to cloud services and the enterprise, but it appears this is one of those moves.