Bryant Departs Intel For Google Cloud
Google has upped its cloud game with its recruitment of Diane Bryant, the former Intel Corp.'s datacenter boss who becomes chief operating officer of Google Cloud.
Bryant, an engineer who worked her way up through the ranks of Intel during the heyday of the U.S. semiconductor industry, took a leave of absence from Intel in May that was expected to last at least six months. At the time, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said he looked forward to Bryant's return.
Instead, Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud announced late last week that Bryant would join the company as COO. Bryant "is an engineer with tremendous business focus and an outstanding thirty-year career in technology," all of it at Intel, Greene noted in announcing the hiring.
Bryant served over the last five years as president of Intel's Datacenter Group, expanding the chip maker's focus on cloud computing, big data and network virtualization technologies. The group generated about $17 billion in revenue during 2016 as Intel's x86-based servers continue to dominate datacenters.
Bryant was instrumental in guiding Intel's transition away from the fading PC market and its unsuccessful foray into mobile devices. Prior to heading its datacenter operations, Bryant was Intel’s corporate vice president and chief information officer, where she oversaw the chip maker's IT technology development.
Bryant is the second senior Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) executive to depart this year. In April, Brent Gorda, generation manager of Intel’s High Performance Data Division, left the company. Gorda is the former CEO of Whamcloud, the Lustre specialist acquired by Intel in 2012.
Meanwhile, the addition of Bryant gives Google Cloud another respected technology leader as it challenges cloud giant Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) in the booming hybrid cloud market. Bryant's "strategic acumen, technical knowledge and client focus will prove invaluable as we accelerate the scale and reach of Google Cloud." Greene noted in a blog post.
Greene, a co-founder and CEO of VMware (NYSE: VMW), took the reins at Google Cloud two years ago with the goal of extending the search giant's (NASDAQ: GOOG) mostly consumer cloud business to the enterprise market still dominated by AWS.
