Google Cloud today announced the appointment of Mark Micallef as Managing Director of its business in Southeast Asia.
Mark will be responsible for driving regional strategy, direction, team development, and overall revenue performance for Google Cloud and Google Workspace, and working with teams across Google to help customers reimagine their business and industry through bold and responsible artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.
Mark will report to Karan Bajwa, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud. He joins Google Cloud following leadership roles at Anaplan, Cloudera, Citrix, and Trend Micro, bringing more than 28 years of technical, sales, and management experience.
Across his career in technology leadership, Mark has helped multiple businesses grow and scale in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Greater China, India, and Korea.
The company has also unveiled new solutions and resources that are now available to organizations across Southeast Asia to help them accelerate their AI journeys. These include:
- Seven new generative AI skills development courses, available at no cost under its Cloud Skills Boost Program.
- The general availability of Generative AI support on Vertex AI. This consists of a Model Garden that gives enterprises’ data scientists and AI practitioners access to pre-trained generative AI models, and Generative AI Studio to help them customize these models and embed them into internal or consumer-facing applications and websites. The Model Garden hosts over 60 models from Google and its partners. This includes models for summarizing and translating text in multiple languages, maintaining an ongoing conversation, turning audio into text, creating studio-grade images from text descriptions, and generating and fixing software code.
- To support seed to Series A startups who use AI as the core technology to develop primary products or solutions, the Google for AI Startups Cloud Program is available to cover their cloud costs of up to US$350,000 over two years. For pre-seed AI-first startups, the Program provides up to US$2,000 in free cloud credits to help fund their development of proof-of-concepts and showcase their products to prospective investors and customers.
