Google Cloud President Tariq Shaukat Vacating His Role

'He's going to take another role -- it looks like pretty imminently -- in the other part of the org, which is still kind of being determined,' the source said. 'There's a couple of kind of senior roles he's looking at, so we expect him to stay.'

Tariq Shaukat, Google Cloud's president of industry products and solutions, is leaving his current position as the cloud provider reorganizes his division.

Shaukat is expected to land another senior role within the larger Google organization, according to a source close to the matter.

"He's going to take another role -- it looks like pretty imminently -- in the other part of the org,” the source told CRN. “There's a couple of kind of senior roles he's looking at, so we expect him to stay. We just don't know where he's going to land."

Shaukat could not be reached for comment.

Google Cloud, effective this past Friday, folded “critical capabilities” from Shaukat's industry products and solutions team into its cloud sales organization run by president Robert Enslin since last April, Business Insider first reported, citing an internal memo from Enslin that it said was “leaked” to the news outlet.

“All of his team is sort of being pushed into the different orgs, including within the sales org,” the source, who confirmed the memo’s legitimacy, told CRN.

The No. 3 cloud provider confirmed it made the “difficult, but necessary decision to notify a small number of employees that their roles will be eliminated” as part of a reorganization.

“We recently communicated organizational changes to a handful of teams that will improve how we market, partner and engage with customers in every industry around the globe,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re working with our internal mobility teams across the company to help those affected by this change and hope to find them new roles within the company.”

The number of affected workers was “far less than 50,” which would have required governmental notification under the U.S. labor law known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act, the source told CRN.

“A key principle behind how we've organized our sales team is getting closer to our customers, so we can help them solve their toughest business challenges and seize their biggest opportunities,” Enslin’s Feb. 13 memo stated, as reported by Business Insider. “As you know, we recently introduced the role of general manager across all of our major product solutions, and last year we shifted more control to our geographical sales regions.”

Google Cloud now is applying that same strategy to industries, according to Enslin’s memo.

“To keep up our momentum, we're bringing critical capabilities from the cloud industry products and solutions team into the cloud sales organization,” his memo stated. “In the interim, these leaders and teams will report to me, but will later transition to align under the new industry solutions leader. The new industry solutions leader will set the vision, mission and strategy for our go-to-market approach for the priority industries we're targeting and will be a member of my leadership team.”

That new industry solutions leader will have a lower-level position than the president’s role held by Shaukat, the source told CRN.

The former chief commercial officer for Caesars Entertainment in Las Vegas, Shaukat joined Google Cloud in 2016 as president of global customer operations, a role in which he built and led Google Cloud’s sales and go-to-market operations for Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Platform, G Suite, Google Maps and devices, according to his LinkedIn page. In 2017, Shaukat assumed the “expanded role” of president of industry products and solutions, with “global responsibility for priority industry vertical product management, engineering, go-to-market and P&L, as well as Google Cloud's ecosystem, business development/strategic partnerships, pricing, international expansion, online customer experience and customer operations,” his LinkedIn page states

Google Cloud has been making a number of organizational moves designed to help close the market share gap with No. 1 cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services and No. 2 Microsoft Azure.

Former Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian, who took over as Google Cloud’s CEO in January 2019, is making an aggressive push for enterprise customers, with plans to triple the size of its sales force in the next few years. Google Cloud has changed how it goes after customers, moving to an industry-based approach covering six areas: the public sector, financial services, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and gaming, media and telco. Enslin, who joined Google Cloud after 27 years at SAP, has been helping reshape and build the cloud provider’s sales organization, hiring a number of executives from Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and other companies in the enterprise space. Changes have been made to empower Google Cloud's regional sales teams, segment partner sales opportunities and bring Google Cloud’s largest systems integrator partners closer to the company.