Google Cloud has announced the appointment of former Dropbox channel boss Simon Aldous as its new director of partners and channels for the UK & Ireland.
Aldous joins the company having spent the last five years at cloud competitor Dropbox, the last two and a half years of which he led as the firm's global head of Channels. Prior to that, he was head of Channels for the EMEA region.
“I am super excited to be starting my next adventure and joining the Google Cloud team at Google,” Aldous said in an announcement on LinkedIn.
“I look forward to working with the Channel Team, Partners and our Corporate Sales team to best serve the needs of our customers and help drive evolution and transformation within their businesses.”
During his time at Dropbox, the executive played a key role in the merger of the firm’s direct and channel sales teams, combining operations into a single commercial entity.
Prior to joining Dropbox, Aldous spent more than two and a half years at Polycom, most recently as sales director UK&I, and previously held the role of Channel Director.
He also spent almost seven years at Microsoft in key leadership roles, as well as earlier positions at Computer 2000, Toshiba, Xbidit, Hyperchannel and Ingram Micro.
For Google Cloud, the appointment comes at a time of strong revenue growth. During the first quarter of 2021, the cloud provider posted a 46% year-over-year hike in in revenues, up to $4.05 billion.
According to analysis from GlobalData, Alphabet’s hiring has “significantly tilted” towards its cloud business in recent times, with job postings for the platform making up around 30% of the tech giant’s total jobs since January 2020.
“Alphabet’s hiring trends have continued to be influenced by the growth of Google Cloud throughout 2021 – not just in 2020 when companies increased reliance on cloud computing platforms,” commented Ajay Thalluri, Business Fundamentals Analyst at GlobalData.
