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brandon_butler
Senior Editor

The pretty penny Google paid to recruit Diane Greene

News
Jan 05, 20161 min
Cloud ComputingGoogle

Former VMware co-founder is now leading Google’s cloud efforts

Late in 2015 with the company looking to increase its position in the public cloud computing market Google made a big bet by hiring VMware co-founder Diane Greene to head up its new push to attract enterprise buyers.

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Thanks to a regulatory filing, now we know just how much that cost Google and parent company Alphabet: $380 million in stock. Greene’s startup named Bebop had 76 investors. Greene herself netted $148 million worth of Alphabet stock in the deal, which according to the Wall Street Journal, she is donating.

The $380 million price tag points to just how aggressively Google/Alphabet pursued Greene, who has sat on the Google board of directors since 2012. One of the fascinating trends for the cloud market in 2016 will be to watch how Greene’s captaining of the Google cloud ship makes it moves in the market against competitors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

brandon_butler
Senior Editor

Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the Cloud Chronicles blog. Before starting at Network World in January 2012, he worked for a daily newspaper in Massachusetts and the Worcester Business Journal, where he was a senior reporter and editor of MetroWest 495 Biz. Email him at bbutler@nww.com and follow him on Twitter @BButlerNWW.

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