In the battle to dominate cloud computing, Google on Tuesday said that it would open its first ‘Cloud Region’ in India by the end of this year. The Silicon Valley giant, which competes with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing services space, said that the ‘Cloud Region’ would be based in Mumbai. It would help the firm to provide its cloud technology and form partnerships with other tech companies including start-ups, to tap the enterprise businesses.
Cloud regions
“India continues to be a fast-growing large market for us,” said Mohit Pande, country manager-India, Google Cloud. “We have Cloud regions across the world, this is our first region that would come up in India,” said Mr. Pande at the Google Cloud Summit held in Bengaluru.
Rick Harshman, managing director, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud, said with the Google Cloud India region, enterprises in the country will soon be able to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits uniquely offered by the Google Cloud Platform services. When live, the Cloud region will offer several services including computing, big data, storage and networking, he said.
“We are making these investments based on the feedback we received from the customers who asked us to establish a Cloud Region here in India,” said Ash Willis, head of partners and alliances for Japan and Asia-Pacific, Google Cloud.
Google said that several large and small Indian enterprises such as commercial vehicles maker Ashok Leyland, Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation and courier services firm DTDC had chosen Google Cloud as their technology platform.
For example, Hike Messenger, the home-grown Indian messaging platform, runs its entire messaging application and network, as well as all front-end traffic, on Google Cloud. Hike users share more than a billion messages each day and 40 billion messages a month.
“Our mission is very simple, Internet for every Indian,” said Google’s vice-president for South-East Asia and India Rajan Anandan, during the keynote address at the Google Cloud Summit. “Whether it is a small sari shop owner in Chandni Chowk or a web developer working from home, access to the Internet is the foundation,” he said.
