Serene Sia (Google Cloud)
Google Cloud has hired Serene Sia as its new country director for Singapore.
Sia will be responsible for leading go-to-market strategy and operations spanning consulting, sales, and partner ecosystem, collaborating with teams across Google.
She will report to Google Cloud Southeast Asia managing director, Mark Micallef.
Prior to joining Google Cloud, Sia held regional leadership roles at Autodesk, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP and brings more than 30 years of diverse business and software technology leadership experience across Asia.
“Whether it’s in launching the AI Trailblazers initiative to accelerate AI adoption or doubling down on a whole-of-government cloud adoption strategy, Singapore—with its pioneering and pro-innovation approach—is well poised to continue harnessing the latest technologies to create new growth opportunities in the digital economy,” Micallef said.
“Serene joins Google Cloud at an exciting phase of our growth in Singapore, where numerous organisations are emerging from our Generative AI Innovation Sandboxes with solution prototypes that they are aiming to scale with enterprise-grade safety, security, and privacy.
“I’m excited that a leader with extensive industry experience and a consultative approach to solving customers’ most critical challenges will help deepen our customer and partner relationships, and ensure we continue to meet their digital transformation needs in this highly strategic and important market.”
“Google Cloud has been driving meaningful initiatives in partnership with the Government—many of which are the first-of-its-kind in Singapore—to democratise the benefits of AI for all,” Sia said.
“I’m excited to be joining the company at a moment where we are not only spearheading conversations about the possibilities of AI but actively helping organizations to apply the technology in practical ways.”
“I look forward to building on the success of these initiatives, deepening relationships with our customers, and enabling them to take full advantage of AI while maintaining protection over their intellectual property, adhering to regulations around data security and privacy, and ensuring that their models and applications are safe to use.”
On November 14, Google Cloud became the first MNC hyperscaler to launch data residency for its generative AI (gen AI) capabilities, giving organisations in Singapore the ability to store data from their use of Vertex AI Model Garden and Generative AI Studio within Singapore.
This move opens up new use cases for local public sector organisations that have been leveraging the AI Government Cloud Cluster that was launched by the Government and Google Cloud in May 2023.
It also enables companies in highly regulated industries, including participants of the AI Trailblazers initiative, to scale the gen AI solution prototypes that they have built to serve more customers and employees.
Google Cloud recently collaborated with the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) in piloting the Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, a fully air-gapped sovereign cloud solution, to support its efforts to harness AI in tackling Singapore's defense and security challenges.
