Report: Former Heroku COO Joins Google Cloud Team

Google is continuing efforts to boost its cloud business with the hire of Oren Teich, who previously worked as a senior executive at platform as a service company Heroku, according to a report by Fortune.

According to the report, Teich will work under Sam Ramji, vice president of product for Google’s cloud business, who incidentally has endorsed Teich for product management and cloud computing skills on LinkedIn. Sources told Fortune that Teich will join Google to run Google App Engine.

The appointment comes a week after Google Cloud senior vice president Diane Greene told a crowd at the Forbes CIO Summit that Google Cloud has a “pretty good shot at being No. 1 in five years.” To accomplish that, Google will not only need to win over enterprise cloud users, but also developers. 

Teich worked at Heroku from 2009 to 2014 in several roles including chief operating officer and general manager. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million, Fortune says.

After leaving Heroku, Teich went on to launch Canvas, a collaborative word processing application. The company has stopped accepting new signups and will continue to run through June 30, 2017, after which the service will be turned off and all user data will be deleted.

According to unnamed sources speaking with Fortune, Canvas co-founder Max Shoening has also joined Google.