Google is bringing on an experienced enterprise tech leader, former Intel datacenter executive Diane Bryant, to serve as chief operating officer under Diane Greene, the company announced Thursday.
Until May, Bryant was group president of Intel’s Data Center Group, one of the brighter stars in the chip company’s constellation as the PC market continues to decline. She stepped down from that role and took a leave of absence to deal with a “personal family member” and at the time Intel said it expected her to return after six or eight months.
But Greene announced in a blog post Thursday that Bryant has agreed to join Google as chief operating officer. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Intel confirmed that Bryant had decided not to return to the company, and that she would receive a $4.5 million separation payment.
“I can’t think of a person with more relevant experience and talents,” Green said in the blog post. “She is an engineer with tremendous business focus and an outstanding thirty-year career in technology.”
It’s an interesting hire for Google in several ways.
Bryant was Intel’s chief information officer before taking on the role leading the data center group, giving Google’s cloud group some keen insight into the needs of its customers evaluating its services. Her chip expertise can also help Google as it continues to develop its own custom silicon for artificial intelligence workloads, and her knowledge of Intel’s margins should come in handy when it’s time for Google to re-order data center processors for its cloud.
And hopefully we can all agree that it’s great to see two women running a prominent technology organization.
