Technology major Google is betting big on India to grow its share of the booming Indian cloud market opportunity. The California-based company says that Indian businesses are now slowly adopting the cloud technology and a focused approach on the market will help to grab a major portion of the pie.
Google’s move to strengthen its cloud platform offering and training in India comes at a time when global majors such as Amazon and Microsoft are rapidly increasing their focus on the Indian market. Recently, Google announced its Google Cloud India region in Mumbai, which will enable Indian enterprises to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits offered by the Google Cloud Platform service. This region offers services such as computing, big data, storage and networking for global customers.
All the global majors are clear that though the adoption is in the early stages, the opportunities are humongous as both large enterprises and emerging Indian businesses from across sectors such as banking, manufacturing, automobile, retail, media, healthcare have emabrked on a journey towards cloud computing.
“We are helping our customers in their journey towards the cloud. We have a strong partnership programme and that is what drives the growth for us here in India. Our technology enables them to leverage the benefit of ML and AI capabilities,” said Oyvind Roti, head of solutions for Japan and Asia Pacific Region at Google Cloud.
According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38% in 2017 to touch $1.81 billion. The highest growth will continue to be driven by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which is projected to grow at 49.2% in 2017, followed by 33% in software as a service (SaaS) and 32.1% in platform as a service (PaaS).
Over the last year, Google has managed to rope in a large number of Indian enterprises to the paid Google Cloud Platform. The companies which are entering the cloud platform are using ML and AI capacity. Home-grown messaging app Hike Messenger is one of the customers of Google Cloud platform and has over 100 million registered users. Some other key customers of Google Cloud are L&T Finance, Karur Vysya Bank, Titan, ShareChat, Policybazaar.com, Quikr, Delhivery and Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital.
“In India, many large enterprises have started using IaaS from us. We focus mainly on the partner-based model and have partnered with many global and Indian independent software vendors to offer our solutions,” added Roti. Apart from this, Google has added a new service called Cloud Spanner at its Mumbai region. According to Google, Cloud Spanner helps in database administration and management and makes application development more efficient. Customers benefit from cost savings, with lower latency and a consistent, unified, global view.
The technology major also believes that with more adoption of cloud there is a need for skilled talent in the country. It has collaborated with Coursera, a leading global online education platform, to launch a series of on-demand Google Cloud Platform training offerings that will also help in growth of cloud services in the country.
