Google has revealed that it plans to expand its employee base in India as the battle with Amazon and Microsoft over cloud dominance ramps up in the country. With the public cloud services market in India projected to grow by 38% in 2017, Google is now actively pursuing strategies to strengthen its foothold in an otherwise vastly untapped market.
Often considered a late entrant in the cloud computing business, Google has primarily relied on its artificial intelligence and machine learning prowess to give them an edge over the competition.
Diving into the details of Google’s plans for India, Country Head for Google Cloud, Mohit Pande stated:
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. 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.
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.
These are early days for 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.
With around USD 30 billion invested towards developing and building its cloud infrastructure over the past three years, the company is also expected to open a new data center in India in the near future.