Colin Timm has been appointed as the new director of Google Cloud across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), tasked with driving enterprise cloud adoption on both sides of the Tasman.
Effective 18 September, Timm - who replaces Renee Gamble in the role - joins the tech giant from Telstra, where he most recently served as executive director across the enterprise business, working with 1,000 of the telco’s largest customers across Australia.
“Colin brings a wealth of experience serving enterprise customers both in Australia and internationally,” Google Cloud managing director of Asia Pacific Rick Harshman said.
“We are delighted to have him to lead the team as more and more Australian businesses come on board with Google Cloud Platform [GCP].”
Timm also managed operations and services for Telstra’s enterprise and government business, with a responsibility for strategy and business enablement, as well as service and contract management.
Prior to Telstra, Timm headed up the regional public sector division at Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing the cloud provider’s government footprint across Asia Pacific.
Furthermore, Timm also spent almost a decade at Microsoft, where he held a number of roles, including general manager of public sector business, with responsibility for 13 countries across the region, as well as running the enterprise business in Australia for four years.
“I am delighted to join the Google Cloud team and lead operations in Australia and New Zealand,” Timm added.
“Google Cloud has real momentum in Australia and I’m looking forward to working closely with local businesses, partners and developers as the ecosystem continues to grow.”
The appointment follows the launch of GCP in Australia only two months ago, with Sydney becoming part of the nine regions, 27 zones and 100 points of presence comprising the global GCP footprint.
As reported by ARN, the local launch allows local partners to now offer end clients the ability to store their data within Australia – a factor that likely held back a number of potential enterprise and government end customers from adopting Google’s cloud services.
“Outside of the performance and latency benefits that customers and partners are going to be able to receive, one other thing is now having the ability to store data locally if partners and customers so choose,” Harshman told ARN at the time.
"That’s a really important point. Many large organisations have the requirement to be able to store data locally, and partners bring that up a lot as well."
