India will play key role in Google's cloud services strategy

With a vibrant startup ecosystem and lesser legacy systems, India will play a key role in Google’s strategy as it looks to take on Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure in the global enterprise cloud services space.

“India is a pretty exciting place because there are so many companies growing so quickly over there and the fact that these companies do not have legacies (systems) is pretty exciting.

“And they can just start in the cloud. You have seen Sundar take a deep interest in India and so, Google overall is very interested in India,” Google cloud chief Diane Greene told PTI.

She added that there is a pool of talented manpower as well and overall, “its vibrant and it’s important to be there (India)”.

Google is investing heavily in creating business tools and products, driven by open source technology and machine learning to help companies use computing in an affordable and faster manner.

“As a primary thing, we have sealed up the infrastructure, and now we are opening it up so that every business across the world can use it,” Pichai, the India-born CEO of Google said at the Google Cloud Products (GCP) Next 2016 conference here.

He cited the example of an animation studio in Mumbai which is using the services to produce a movie, underlying the importance of emerging markets like India.

Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who was also present at the event, said the use of crowd sourcing, machine intelligence and rapid evaluation will create huge new platforms for companies, IPOs, wealth and “great new things in the future. Its a great time to be in cloud.”

Google, which has customers like Spotify and Disney, said it is also focussing on ensuring compliance, support and integration with existing IT investments to help clients use public cloud services to accelerate their business.

“We’re combining the 15-plus years of ground-breaking, applied computer science in distributed computing, data management and machine learning that powers Google with the capabilities businesses need to safely adopt cloud today,” she said.

The VMWare co-founder said Google will use machine learning and big data analytics to help customers.

“We are doing a lot of work on our roadmaps. We have roadmaps for engineering, customers and partner enablement marketing and communicating with the world.

“We often get asked if Google is serious about enterprise and our answer is we are totally committed to this, we have invested billions of dollars on this to bring our innovation and technology to companies,” Greene said.

“We are not a follower. We were in the cloud 16 years ago.  We got into enterprise after a few of these other companies decided to.

“But in terms of our product differentiation and strategy, we are not a follower. We have machine learning, open source, so we are a very different cloud with a lot of differentiation,” she said.

Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have a sizable presence in the cloud infrastructure market, capturing billions of dollars that businesses are spending to outsource their computing and storage needs.

“For our customers, cloud means no longer having to think about data centres, servers, storage and networking. Instead, they’re able to focus on creating amazing applications, products and services for their customers knowing that Google is taking care of the infrastructure powering their business,” Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google, said.

He added that the company has announced two new locations in Oregon, US and Tokyo, Japan and both will get operational later this year.

“These are the first two of more than 10 additional GCP regions we’ll be adding to our network through 2017,” he said but declined to comment on whether it would include India.