Machine learning, AI will differentiate Google Cloud from others: Mohit Pande

Technology giant Google is gearing up to edge out close rivals Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud services space in India with its first cloud region (data centre) in Mumbai within this year.

Google has 12 cloud regions globally, including four in Asia-Pacific, namely, Tokyo, Singapore, Taiwan, and Sydney. Google has invested close to USD 30 billion in the last few years to build the cloud and data centre infrastructure.

“India is a very important for Google with a huge addressable market. Opening a region in India will allow us to serve our customers here better, and improve the service, in terms of latency, for example,” Google’s Country Manager for India, Mohit Pande told Moneycontrol.

The broader aim of setting up a local cloud region is to accelerate the growth in India market.

Pande expects that a local data centre will spur Google’s growth of partnerships with developers, independent software vendors, system integrators, and so on. Google will also double its Cloud segment workforce here, but Pande declined to share the exact numbers.

The public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38 percent in 2017 to total USD 1.81 billion, from USD 1.32 billion in 2016. By 2020, the public cloud services market in India is poised to reach USD 4.10 billion.

Google, however, is a tad late to the party. Rivals Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have already set up public cloud data centres in the country. But the tech giant is making a confident stride into the market on the back of in-built machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

“We have invested heavily in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The reason why enterprises buy Google Cloud is the extra capabilities that it offers. It’s not just an infrastructure to store your data. It also effectively analyses, throws business insights, processes data based on voice, video, and so on. The ML and AI layers will differentiate Google from other service providers,” Pande added.

Globally, Amazon Web Services dominates the public cloud market with a 37.1% market share, followed by Microsoft Azure with a 28.4% share. Google stands at a distant third with 16.5% market share.

“These are early days for Cloud. Only about 10% of all workload globally is on Cloud as of now. According to statistics, over 40 million Indians will shop online by this year-end, and 100 million by 2018. India will be the global hub of innovation. There is a huge opportunity brewing up,” Rajan Anandan, Vice President, South East Asia and India, Google said.

The Google Cloud enterprise offering consists of the cloud platform, G Suite applications for workplace productivity, Google Maps for location-based services, and Android devices for business.

The G Suite product comprising Gmail, Google Drive, and collaboration software for businesses have seen significant traction according to Pande, with small and medium-sized enterprises increasingly opting for it. Globally, Google has over 3 million businesses paying to use G Suite.