 "We are working on making Android enterprise-ready: Amit Singh")
How would you rate Google Enterprise’s success globally?
It is an accelerated business. People are moving into cloud-based services. And, we are past the early adopter stage and into mainstream now. It is also because business models are changing and they are more technology-led rather than human resource-led. I am seeing that technology and cloud are the number one on the chief executive’s agenda now. And, you are seeing the same phenomenon occurring in India.
Small businesses are faster adopters — they are more price-sensitive, have less legacy and can adopt new things quickly. We also encourage adoption by reducing our price. And, we have seen that having a positive impact. There is a 70 per cent growth on a very large number and even if we don’t it break out, its pretty phenomenal.
The whole idea of taking consumer experiences and bringing it to enterprises is kind of great… . It’s a generational shift. The consumer-led innovation is eventually going to make its way into enterprise — it’s just a matter of time. Not that it is easy. You have to convince people of security, data, change management, integration with existing infrastructure — so there are legitimate questions.
Have clients become less confident of your services after the Prism revelations?
The US National Security Agency (NSA) stuff gets a lot of headlines. The reality is that Google has been doing a lot for data security — we encrypt everything, put it in different servers… . The NSA stuff does raise questions about security, our user policies, etc. But it hasn’t impacted the growth rates in India. There is no revenue or user-acquisition impact; maybe the sale cycle length has increased in some large customers.
Given Google’s popularity, does a shift to the practice of bringing one’s own device give you an edge?
The best of Google services, be it Gmail or Drive or Hangouts, are part of the Android ecosystem. Bringing Android to work is something we need to do more and more work on. So that it will be easy for people to adopt any device and have corporate policies. We are working on making Android enterprise-ready. In fact, we are pretty excited about bringing the best of Google to work.
In the last six-nine months, we have added a private Play store, so that your company can have your own store and curate the applications that you want your users to have. We have added a mobile policy management, through which you can see all the services you want to turn on on the devices and you can also manage services such as encryption to passwords to SSL. We want to take those capabilities deeper over the next few quarters, so that we can make Android a first-class BYOD (bring your own device) system.
How is the Chrome operating system doing in India?
Chrome is now the number one browser in the world and number one by far in India. We have seen tremendous adoption in education for Chromebooks and in businesses like kiosk-based workers or manufacturing. We have now 10 companies that are building Chromebooks. It offers India a great opportunity to create Chromebooks here locally and we are talking with some folks to build it for India, so that we can provide cheaper computing with a full-fledged keyboard and a great experience to users.
Do you think your devices’ popularity will be contained by the challenges around internet connectivity in India?
Yes. But if you look at where third-generation (3G) or fourth-generation (4G) technology are, the connected users and the investment that the telcos are making, India is on the cusp of some pretty dramatic changes. The smartphone revolution is going through the roof right now. Second, we have made a lot of our products offline.
So, when you don’t have connectivity you can still be productive. I think 3G and 4G will help the rollout of cloud here along with the smartphone adoption. More and more people are bypassing the personal computer and spending more time on devices. We have a very long-term view of India, as the sheer number of users here is huge and there is a strong technical bias towards Google, Chrome and Android.
There is also a bias towards freeware, which we love, as we price our products very affordably or make these free if possible. The lack of infrastructure on the fixed line can be bypassed by 3G and 4G significantly, which allows an advantage to India. Whereas other countries have already laid a lot of things and you need to have compatible networks. India can use the mobile revolution to its advantage and cloud can be a key enabler.