Google looks at doubling its headcount in India for its cloud business this year as it readies itself to take on Amazon and Microsoft- the cloud giants which has marked their dominance in the country, one of Google’s top executive told ET. The public cloud services market is projected to touch total $246.8 billion in 2017, according to Gartner.
“Organizations are pursuing strategies because of the multidimensional value of cloud services, including values such as agility, scalability, cost benefits, innovation and business growth,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “While all external-sourcing decisions will not result in a virtually automatic move to the cloud, buyers are looking to the ‘cloud first’ in their decisions, in support of time-to-value impact via speed of implementation.”
“We are building our go-to market, which spans across segments and industries. This year we are doubling our team here and we will probably double this again as we move forward,” said Mohit Pande, country head – India, Google Cloud. He did not disclose the headcount in India at present.
Over the past three years, Google has invested $30 billion on its cloud platform in building infrastructure. The company will open its first cloud region in India this year. The cloud region will be headquartered in Mumbai and will have three zones, covering the whole of India. This is where customers will be able to choose to locate their applications as per their requirements.
“India is a large market for us, also a very strategic market. We are investing a lot in India, we are opening a cloud region, we are investing in sales, marketing, customer engineering teams, professional services and partner network. We are building this ecosystem as India is a significant part of our strategy,” said Pande.
Google is seen as a late entrant in the cloud business as rivals IBM, Microsoft and Amazon already have public cloud data centers in India. Nonetheless, the search giant looks bullish on its approach. It is interesting to note that Google is making progress in its cloud services not just in India, but across geography. Last week, it launched a new region in London. “In cities like London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Amsterdam, our performance testing shows 40%-82% reductions in round-trip time latency when serving customers from London compared with the Belgium region,” Tech Crunch quoted Google Cloud product manager Dave Stiver as saying.
“These are early days for the cloud. It is a very large market and we think less than 10% of workload has moved to the cloud. Most of the market is for everyone to play. We see a big momentum coming in,” said Pande. “We also think that as the overall environment for cloud improves in India, internet infrastructure is improving significantly. We are seeing the cost of data go down. We are seeing mobility moving in India big time. Corporates in India are jumping ahead and right now is a great time for any cloud company to be in India,” he added.
Source: cxotoday.com
Google To Double Headcount In India For Cloud Biz
