GitHub sets up Indian subsidiary to cater to its third largest community of developers

In a bid to plug into India’s growing developer community, Microsoft-owned Github is setting up a subsidiary in Bengaluru. Former Adobe executive Maneesh Sharma will lead the developer community’s growth strategy as general manager of GitHub India.

The company aims to build its community, engineering, sales, support, marketing and services teams in the country over the next few months, it said in a statement.

India houses GitHub’s third largest community of developers, which has grown by 22% in the past year. Food delivery platform Swiggy and cloud-based software solutions company for pharmacovigilance and drug safety ArisGlobal are some of its customers here. 

“Over the past year, the number of public repositories in India has grown 75%, demonstrating a sharp increase in collaboration across the Indian developer community,” Erica Brescia, COO, GitHub, said on Wednesday at the ongoing Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2020 in Mumbai.

“In building a local team in India, our goal is to create stronger relationships with developers and support open source development across developers, maintainers and enterprises,” she said.

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Founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and Scott Chacon, GitHub provides hosting for software development version control using Git. Git is a distributed version control system used to track changes in the source code during software development. Over 40 million developers have been associated with more than 100 million Git projects, the company said.

The platform, which was acquired by Redmond-headquartered Microsoft in October 2018 for $7.5 billion, offers access control and a host of collaborative features such as bug tracking, task management, feature requests and wikis (document repository) for every project.

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GitHub will also expand its channel partner programme to support GitHub enterprise customers and its GitHub Hackathon Grant programme to students in India to support the next generation of developers.