Google Australia hires AWS' Ash Willis as head of cloud partners in Asia-Pacific

Google has appointed Ash Willis as head of cloud partners and alliances for the Asia-Pacific and Japan business.

Willis will be responsible for building Google's partner ecosystem across the region and promoting the tech giant's cloud offering.

He will manage significant investment in Google’s cloud business in the region and work to build relationships with key partners, the company said.

Willis joins Google from AWS, where he was the head of training and certification for Asia-Pacific for almost five years.

He started his carrer as a technical business manager with Express Data in 2001. In 2003, he headed to Citrix where he was a sales engineer for close to three years. He was then appointed as business development and solutions lead at HP Australia. In 2007 he joined VMware as a manager, partner systems engineer and was promoted in 2009 to senior manager, education and enablement, where he stayed until 2012 before moving on to AWS.

"Google Cloud partners are essential to our commitment to help enterprises innovate faster, scale smarter and stay secure. An open platform encompassing diverse partners maximizes the possible surface of innovation for customers, letting them move more quickly. Partners deliver significant value to our customers, and we're committed to supporting their success," a spokesperson told CRN.

Google announced in September 2016 plans to bring its cloud platform to Sydney with three new availability zones for Google Cloud, its infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offering.

At the time, Rick Harshman, APJ managing director of Google Cloud Platform told CRN that Google had received an "enormous amount of requests and interest from system integrators and managed service providers in Australia".

The new availability zones are expected to go online this year, although Google has not given a date yet. In March, the company said that the Sydney launch would come after the Singapore and Northern Virginia zones went live.

The latest financial results from Alphabet, Google's parent company, revealed a 49.4 percent growth in what it classifies as "other revenue", which includes its cloud unit, Pixel smartphones and Play store.

Alphabet does not break out revenue contribution within the "other revenue" segment, but analysts have said that cloud is the most prominent among the category's clutch of businesses.