Interview: Google Enterprise VP Amit Singh on expansion, social and numbers
We sat down with Google Enterprise Vice President Amit Singh in his Mountain View office this week to discuss the direction and plans of the Google Enterprise team. While he did not share the all-important revenue numbers with us, he did shine a light on Google Apps’ impressive growth across all of its markets.
Singh was a two-decade alumnus of Oracle when he came with many, many others to the GooglePlex last March to help Dave Girouard and the Enterprise Team sell to big business. Oracle announced this week very disappointing earnings that has thrown the stock price off almost 15 percent. Meanwhile, Google Apps is growing like gangbusters; Perhaps Singh’s timing is good.
9to5Google: Hi, Amit. I assume we’re here to talk about your big GM announcement.
Singh: We have no big announcements today but look forward to a whole assortment of announcements in mid-January. We tend to announce new customers after implementation rather than after sign up. Here’s a hint: we’re growing very big in South America…and Asia, where we’re building three monster data centers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore that should all be online in the next 12-18 months.
9to5Google: Speaking on that, Apps has had a pretty solid year. It seems like you have a big announcement almost every week and new features added to Google Docs every day.
Singh: It has been incredible across the board. We are seeing double the daily signups and about 5,000 organizations per day vs. 3,000 per day at the beginning of the year [those numbers also seems to point to bigger signups] and a lot of those are paying users.
9to5Google: You mentioned the new Hong Kong data center and it appears that Google’s plan for China is to deal with Hong Kong’s system. But what about users in China? Certainly international organizations have to be wary of Google’s relationship with greater China.