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Exec walks the dog, swaps Google work day for Workday work day

Pete Lorant, EMEA director calls it a day at the chocolate factory

Workday has hired Google veteran Peter Lorant to run its alliances business in Europe.

Lorant, the soon-to-be-former EMEA & Asia Pacific sales director for Google for Work confirmed he starts at Workday - the cloud financial and, er, human capital management software maker - on 25 January.

“I was at Google for seven years and enjoyed my time there,” he told El Chan. He wasn’t able to say much about the new role because he needed authorisation from his new employer.

The fact we “caught” him “walking his dog” perhaps didn’t help. He pointed us to some comments he made on LinkedIn about Google being a “tough act to follow” - clearly a corporate trooper until the end.

Google for Work threw off the gloves late late year to battle Microsoft and its extensive mid-market sales programmes for Office 365 by launching the Go Google scheme in multiple countries.

Under the scheme, revealed by us last year, Google will subsume the costs of its online collaboration apps for Microsoft customers until their Microsoft contract has expired. Channel partners are being given cash to subsidise the cost of deployments.

Previously, Microsoft had paid its channel sellers $40 per seat for the first 3,000 seats they managed to convert to Office 365, and once warned if it competed with Google on price, it would lose.

The fight will continue but not with Lorant leading the charge. Previously, Lorant was channel director for Google for Work, prior to that he was at Postini and even further back in time he was marketing manager at Computacenter. ®

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