Watch: Multi-cloud, industry solutions, AI expertise will drive Google Cloud’s growth in India, says Bikram Singh Bedi

Google Cloud recently opened its second cloud Region in Delhi, after opening its first one in Mumbai in 2017. The company is behind industry leaders AWS and Microsoft Azure in terms of the cloud market, but Google Cloud has been making giant strides in the past few years. 

In terms of numbers, Google Cloud clocked an increase in cloud revenue of 54% as compared to the second quarter in the last fiscal. Its cloud revenue was at $4.63 billion for the quarter ending June 30, up from $3 billion in the same period last year.  

In an interview, Bikram Singh Bedi, the MD of Google Cloud India, sheds light on what the company intends to do in terms of driving more growth here. He added that Google Cloud is banking on how enterprises want to avoid vendor lock-in, are looking at implementing AI/ML  (artificial intelligence/ machine learning) and want a cloud partner who can provide not just the infrastructure, but industry solutions as well.

Edited excerpts: 

What was the strategy behind choosing Delhi as your second cloud region?   

We’re expanding our local infrastructure in response to customer demand. After our Mumbai region, our customers and partners kept telling us we will need a second region. Delhi is home to a number of top Indian startups, which made it a natural choice.  

 In terms of benefits, it makes it easier and faster for digital natives and traditional enterprises to leverage our network. Customers of Google Cloud in the northern region will now have better latencies than before. Secondly, the region provides better disaster recovery options and control of data through data residency, operational transparency and privacy controls. And lastly, customers can store their data locally and also meet digital sovereignty requirements, especially in regulated industries. 

Which major verticals are your key focus areas?   

 Globally we are focused on six specific verticals, and the same is for India too. These are financial services, telecom, media & entertainment, retail, healthcare, manufacturing & public sector. In telecommunication, we are helping Jio migrate its core infrastructure to 5G. In manufacturing, we are working with TVS for auto components.   

In the IT (information technology) space, we are working with companies such as Tech Mahindra and Wipro on their SAP deployments, which is probably one of the largest deployments on the cloud for SAP in the country today. Across the board, we've been working with different industries and verticals, and we are seeing a significant amount of momentum coming from them.    

Apart from WFH and video conferencing, which other factors do you feel will drive Google Cloud’s growth in India?   

The products that we have in our collaboration portfolio, which is Google Workspace clearly fulfils how people should collaborate and work to drive innovation internally as well as with their customers. Flexibility is also driving Google Cloud’s adoption, more specifically from a true multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud strategy. We are helping customers avoid lock-in through our multi-cloud products Anthos and BigQuery.  

Secondly, we are the leaders in AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) as we have been working on the same for many years. This combined with Google’s data analytics is a differentiating factor.  

The other factor is our customised industry solutions. We are building first-party and packaged solutions to tackle challenges in core industries. Additionally, customers love that they can protect data with the same security tools that is built by Google and is used by Google. Last but not least is sustainability, we are the cleanest cloud in the industry and have been carbon neutral since 2007. 

Could you elaborate on how industry solutions provide you with an edge in the market?   

Traditionally cloud has been about providing good infrastructure, all the best. Google goes the extra mile and also provides solutions for business problems along with the infrastructure.  For an e-commerce company, the problems are route optimization, customer acquisition, increasing conversion. For a telecommunications company, it is about data monetization. For banks, it is UPI, lending and a host of others. The whole concept of industry solutions is where we lead as we can provide industry solutions along with our cloud infrastructure.