If there were still any doubts about how committed Google is to becoming a leader in public cloud computing, the company’s cloud and enterprise chief tried to put them to rest today at the Google I/O developer conference.

Diane Greene, the senior vice president in charge of cloud and enterprise computing at Google since she was hired last November, drove that point home during an enterprise panel for the press. In the past, Google has been diffident about its cloud business, leaving lingering uncertainty among many companies about its long-term commitment.

“We’ve just seen a huge uptick in interest from customers,” she said. Google has been spending big to hire people for its growing roster of cloud services, such as its storage, a Compute Engine and machine learning.

Google also is spending big to hire people on getting the services to market, she said. That includes an alliance group working with partners on application programming interfaces and cloud services. There’s also a new group to work directly with customers, providing help such as training in machine learning. “We have been meeting with so many customers and partners,” she said.

Asked whether Google will ever fulfill one of its executive’s promise that cloud computing eventually would be a bigger business for the company than advertising,” Greene implied it was not a pipe dream.

“This is a major revolution, this move to the cloud,” she said. “It’s the biggest revolution in IT in my lifetime, a trillion-dollar industry. We’re going to be able to support a big proportion of the IT industry with Google Cloud. It’s our time to do this.”

Indeed, Greene implied that Google doesn’t have a difficult selling job to enterprises. “I met with three Fortune 500 companies recently and I didn’t have to do any convincing,” she said. “It’s apparent that we’re very dedicated to the enterprise.”

One surprise Greene has run into is how many large companies want a “dual approach to the cloud. They want two cloud partners.”

As a result, she said, companies that currently run on Amazon Web Services are approaching Google not so much to move all their workloads over but to share them. “We’re quite enterprise-ready and people are seeing that and seeing our strengths,” she said.

Google announced a number of initiatives at I/O aimed at enterprise developers, including its mobile development platform Firebase, new APIs for Google Apps for Work such as Sheets and Slides to ease workflows and connections to partners such as SAP and Salesforce.com.

Photo: Robert Hof