Google has hired Diane Greene, a founder and former CEO of VMware, to run Google Cloud Platform along with the Google for Work and Google Applications divisions.

The appointment was announced today along with the pending acquisition of bebop, a startup Greene founded. Bebop is a platform for building and maintaining enterprise applications. Presumably, its calling card is that it does all this with the cloud in mind — at least, that's a decent guess given Greene's background and the long-term trend of applications migrating to the cloud.

Greene will join Google upon closing of the bebop deal, Google CEO Sundar Pichai writes in a blog post this afternoon, although he doesn't say how soon that might be.

The appointment looks like a strong move for Google, which is facing a lengthy dogfight as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others such as IBM SoftLayer go up against market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud services business.

As an indication of the cloud's importance, Google is piling Applications and Google Cloud into one newly created business to be run by Greene. Her team will include the engineering and sales sides of these divisions.

Greene has been on Google's board for three years and will continue serving there, Pichai's blog notes.

Photo by Keoni Cabral on Flickr, cropped. CC2.0 license.