 "Google zeroes in on cloud offerings")
According to the company, India has become one of the fastest growing markets for Google, with increasing internet access and rising smartphone penetration, plus growing cloud adoption. A recent Gartner report says the Indian public cloud services market will reach $1.26 billion by the end of this year.
"Google was born in cloud. We have been investing in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) since 2000 and are now bringing all of that to our businesses, and helping them build their digital journey," said Mohit Pande, country manager, Google for Work, India & Southeast Asia. "Cloud is one of the most strategic businesses for us globally. We have just started to build our enterprise muscle, to take it to the next level."
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In 2015, Google invested $9.9 billion to build a global cloud infrastructure. Integrating, it said, many years of deep networking and machine learning expertise, to provide businesses with powerful application hosting, data analysis and computing resources.
"India is one of our fastest growing markets. We are focusing on products relevant to developing markets like India," said Pande. "For instance, India doesn't have a consistent (telecom) network and so our products and offerings can run on 2G (second-generation technology). And, increasingly, we are introducing offline capabilities, similar to what we have done for YouTube and Google Maps. We are providing our enterprise services at competitive prices, much lower than our prices in other countries," said Pande.
Start-ups and small & medium businesses (SMBs) remain key focus areas for Google. "We are seeing most start-ups in India adopting Google Cloud. SMBs are also showing a lot of momentum to get on cloud. Even for large enterprises, which have been engaged with other cloud service providers and are bound by a contract to continue the partnership for two-three years, we are letting them use Google Apps for free for the duration of that contract period," added Pande. "To drive adoption of Google for Work Apps, apart from making the services work in poor network areas, as well as in offline mode, we are focusing on lightweight apps, and are re-engineering the applications so that they consume 90 percent less data," said Rajan Anandan, vice-president for Indian and Southeast Asia at Google.
The other building block of the Google for Work portfolio is Google Cloud, which it is aggressively promoting. To push the cloud adoption, while the company is focusing on start-ups and SMBs, it also works with global and local system integrators, which enable large and small companies to get on the cloud. "Building and scaling up the partnership system is another focus area," said Pande.
Adding: "We think we are barely scratching the surface as the industry for the cloud platform. We believe we have entered the market at the right time, with the kind of products and offerings which are based on AI and machine learning or the big infrastructure that we have built in. We think India as a market is now ready to consume these services...We are very optimistic about India and about Google Apps and Cloud in a big way. It is one of the most strategic markets for us."
Vishal Tripathi, research director at Gartner, said: "Google is primarily perceived as a consumer-oriented company, due to its Gmail and Android offerings. What they are trying to do is enter the enterprise market with Google Cloud, wherein they will be offering big data analytics capability, in which they are well positioned, among other things. In India, they are trying to position themselves as a serious contender to the top four here -- Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Oracle."
FASTEST GROWING MARKET
- Google invested about $10 bn to build global cloud infra
- Eyeing Indian public cloud market, set to reach $1.2 bn