Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard used his Google+ page to announce late Friday afternoon that he’s leaving the Googleplex after an eight-year run to helm Upstart.com, a new education-focused startup.

“It’s true. After eight wonderful and life-altering years, I’ve decided to leave Google to pursue my own adventure. I owe a lifetime of gratitude to +Larry Page +Sergey Brin and +Eric Schmidt and so many others at Google for giving me such an incredible opportunity. I don’t know if I’ll ever match the learning experience I’ve had here, but I’m going to give it one hell of a try,” read Girouard’s post in part.

Over the course of his tenure at Google, Girouard was a major voice for the enterprise IT cloud transformation, evangelizing the Google Apps software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite and Google App Engine application platform to enterprises of all sizes. Back in 2008, when Google Apps initially launched for business domains under Girouard’s leadership, it was billed as a “hosted application suite” – the term “cloud” was barely conceived, let alone used for an enterprise application. And Google was a consumer-focused company, with most thinking that its play against the Microsoft Office monolith was doomed from the word “go.”

Fast forward to Google Atmosphere 2011, where Google was able to boast 99.9 percent uptime, high customer satisfaction rates, excited engineers and plenty of CIOs in attendance to talk up the Google Apps platform. It’s not perfect, but in less than four years, it’s come a long way and has become a considerable thorn in Microsoft’s side.

Girouard’s legacy is best represented by these figures on Google Enterprise as it stands today, relayed by a Google spokesperson:

As for the new startup, Upstart.com, details are slim, but the current landing page describes it as “Upstart lets you raise capital in return for a small portion of your future income. So you can do what you were meant to do.”

Girouard is no stranger to startups – he and current VP of Product Management for Google+ Bradley Horowitz were co-founders of multimedia search and management startup Virage, giving him plenty of experience in getting a company off the ground.

Services Angle

The timing of Girouard’s move is especially interesting for two reasons: First, this week has seen a ton of chatter around a perceived culture shift at Google, as the search giant realigns its business model around Google+ and social data.

Second, Digg founder Kevin Rose and DARPA Chief Regina Dugan both landed in new positions at Google in vague executive leadership roles this week. Does this changing of the guard represent a pivot of core values in the Googleplex? Only time will tell.