Oren Teich, a tech executive who helped run Heroku, a popular software development web site owned by Salesforce, has joined Google’s cloud computing effort, Fortune has learned.
Google (GOOG) is pushing hard to attract software developers to use its infrastructure to build and deploy their applications. Several sources confirmed Teich’s move and that he will work under Sam Ramji, vice president of product for Google’s cloud business.
Google declined to comment.
From 2009 to 2014, Teich was at Heroku, rising to become chief operating officer and general manager, according to his LinkedIn profile. Salesforce(CRM) bought Heroku for $212 million in 2010.
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Teich left Salesforce in 2014 to start Canvas, a company that built a collaborative word processing application. Canvas stopped taking new customers last year.
Max Schoening, Teich’s Canvas co-founder and Heroku colleague, has also joined Google, sources said.
One source close to Teich said he will help run Google App Engine (GAE), a Heroku-like development environment running on Google infrastructure.
Google’s cloud effort, overseen by senior vice president Diane Greene, faces two very tough and well-funded rivals in market leader Amazon (AMZN) Web Services and No. 2 Microsoft (MSFT) Azure. The more Google can do to woo and retain software developers as customers, the more traction it will get with its business-focused products.
