Amid the hubbub and pace of last week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, quite a bit happened in the cloud computing world. Maybe the biggest piece of news to emerge was Stephen Orban finally going public at Google Cloud.

Google Cloud’s Stephen Orban

Remember that Orban ran AWS Marketplace for about a year before departing for a role at the world’s third-largest cloud provider last June. He stayed under the radar until now, and he’s talking up cloud migrations — since he’s in charge of them and all. Our slideshow above looks at that development.

After that, find out what’s new regarding Broadcom’s anticipated, $61 billion purchase of VMware. CEO Hock Tan traveled to Brussels for one special purpose, which we discuss.

From there, this cloud news roundup almost looks like a Google Cloud-only affair. Stephen Orban and cloud migrations marked just the start. But two of the vendor’s partners – JumpCloud,

also a vendor, and SADA, a managed service provider – have announcements of interest to the channel.

But we offset the seemingly all-Google Cloud news with a look at a new report from DigitalOcean. Partners who serve SMBs will be particularly keen to understand their customers’ reliance on generative AI (which this Motley Fool article predicts is the key to cloud companies’ futures anyway).

See the slideshow above to get started.