Google Cloud builds SAP teams to win customers like Whirlpool

Beyond Whirlpool, Google Cloud has also been working on SAP applications with customers like Vodafone, Cardinal Health, AES, and Home Depot."We put a lot of energy and thought into this," Snehanshu Shah, managing director of SAP solution engineering at Google Cloud, told Insider. Building out its SAP business has meant hiring engineers tasked with making SAP databases run seamlessly and speedily on Google Cloud, while also bolstering its SAP-specific customer support."If you call us for support, you have a person talking to you that knows something about SAP applications and knows how to work with SAP," Shah said.Developing those services has been key to Google Cloud building credibility in the SAP ecosystem as an alternative to similar offerings from Microsoft and Amazon, says Emily Lewis-Pinnell, vice president of cloud and application transformation at NTT DATA Services. They were very much an engineering company."For Google's part, Shah says that the company sees its proficiency in artificial intelligence as an advantage for customers who want to put the financial or operational data stored in their SAP databases to work in newer, more cutting-edge applications.Internally, too, Google Cloud has poached several executives from SAP over the past two years, including cloud sales president Robert Enslin.