Google Cloud has named Mark Micallef as the Managing Director of its business operations in Southeast Asia. In this role, Micallef will spearhead the regional strategy, team development, and revenue performance for Google Cloud and Google Workspace. He will collaborate with various teams within Google to assist customers in reimagining their businesses through innovative and responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions.
Micallef will report directly to Karan Bajwa, the Vice President of Asia Pacific at Google Cloud. With over 28 years of experience in technical, sales, and management roles, Micallef brings a wealth of expertise from his previous leadership positions at Anaplan, Cloudera, Citrix, and Trend Micro. He has played instrumental roles in driving growth and scalability for businesses across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Greater China, India, and Korea.
Google Cloud has been steadily gaining traction and market share among enterprises in Southeast Asia, including those in regulated industries. Renowned companies such as AI Singapore, Axiata Group Berhad (Axiata), Doctor Anywhere, Globe Telecom, GoTo Group, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Jiva, Nanyang Technological University, Ninja Van, Ocean Network Express, One Mount Group, PT Bank Rakyat Indonesia (Bank BRI), PT BNI Life Insurance (BNI Life), PT Meratus Line (Meratus), Purple Ventures Co., Ltd. (Robinhood), Salim Group, StarHub, TD Tawandang, Telkom Indonesia, and Tiki have turned to Google Cloud for its modern infrastructure, pre-trained models, and developer-friendly tools. These organizations leverage Google Cloud’s offerings to rapidly and securely deploy AI solutions, driving growth and resolving critical business challenges.
Recently, Google Cloud announced strategic partnerships with the Singapore Government, including the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO), and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). These collaborations aim to develop AI solutions for Singapore and promote Singaporean AI innovations globally.
For organizations thinking of utilizing AI, Google Cloud has introduced a range of solutions and resources in Southeast Asia:
- Seven new generative AI skills development courses, provided at no cost through the Cloud Skills Boost Program.
- The general availability of Generative AI support on Vertex AI offers a Model Garden comprising pre-trained generative AI models. The Generative AI Studio also empowers data scientists and AI practitioners to customize these models and integrate them into internal or consumer-facing applications and websites. The Model Garden hosts over 60 models, covering tasks such as text summarization and translation, ongoing conversation management, audio-to-text conversion, studio-grade image generation from text descriptions, and software code generation and correction.
- The Google for AI Startups Cloud Program supports startups using AI as their core technology to develop primary products or solutions. This program covers cloud costs of up to US$350,000 over two years for seed to Series A startups. Pre-seed AI-first startups can receive up to US$2,000 in cloud credits to fund proofs-of-concept development and showcase their products to potential investors and customers.
Mark Micallef’s appointment as the Managing Director of Google Cloud Southeast Asia reinforces the company’s commitment to empowering businesses in the region with innovative AI solutions and enabling their growth in the digital landscape.