Google's top Google for Work guy will now be leading a virtual reality team
Amit Singh, who hopped from Oracle to Google about six years ago to help
Google establish its Google for Work, is jumping to the company's new virtual reality team.
Singh's main claim to fame inside Google was turning Google Apps into a major competitor to Microsoft Office, building out a professional enterprise sales team as well as operations, support.
He also helped Google turn its Chromebooks into a real business, and he was key in helping Google commit itself to cloud computing. Cloud has now become one of Google's biggest internal pushes.
He will becoming a vice president of business and operations for Google's young virtual reality team, which is led by Clay Bavor. This includes Google Cardboard, a piece of cardboard you put over your phone to turn it into a VR device. It started out as more-or-less a joke back in 2014 but has now become a real thing. In January, Google said it shipped 5 million units of the Google Cardboard viewer.
The team also manages projects like Google's amazing Jump 360 cameras for filming in 3D andTilt Brush for painting and creating graphics in 3D, and other not-yet-disclosed projects. (It does not include Glass, Google's augmented reality glasses.)
Singh is known as an operations guy, someone who takes early stage stuff and turns them into real businesses, with business models, sales support and what-have-you. So his move could signify that Google is ready to start turning Cardboard and other VR technologies into a real business.
VR is expected to become a big thing in the coming years with many of the big tech companies working on it, including Microsoft with its HoloLens and Facebook with Oculus Rift.
It's also worth pointing out that Google had recently hired a new boss over Singh, Diane Greene. Greene came in as a sort of CEO role for a new combined cloud unit, which included Amit's team (sales and operations for Google for Work) as well as the engineering, product teams and sales teams for its cloud computing services.
We're told that Singh's role is not going away and Greene is actively looking for his replacement. The formal reason for the change of jobs is that Singh loves early stage technology and was looking for a new challenge.
Thrilled to be joining Google VR team to lead biz and ops. Incredibly proud of @googleforwork and where they are headed
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