Google expands its sales team in India

MUMBAI: Google is expanding its sales team in India as it looks to woo more enterprises to host applications on its cloud platform. The move comes as the search engine giant aggressively competes with rivals such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services in the country.

The push comes as Google sees traditional enterprises shifting their IT infrastructure towards the cloud to be agile and compete with Indian unicorns who have leveraged the pay-asyou-use model of hosting applications on the cloud. Google is also looking to tap the public cloud business in India.

Rick Harshman, MD, Google Cloud, Apac, told ET that the company’s expansion strategy in India would be driven by adoption of multi-cloud strategies by large companies and with a push of its new open cloud platform, Anthos.


According to Harshman, large companies in India have increased the pace of transferring their onpremise applications to the cloud in the last 12-18 months.

“The thing that really is driving the enterprises, in my personal opinion, is there’s so much more competition now,” he said.

“Its because cloud has been an enabler for so many of these unicorns on a global basis and here in India...You look at Ola, Byju’s, Truecaller, Hike or Sharechat— none of these companies existed a few years ago and they are disrupting how traditional businesses work,” Harshman said.

“Cloud is enabling a democratisation of IT and great ideas to come to the forefront faster... Traditional enterprises (therefore) have to be innovative and agile.”

The company has been receiving the maximum investment to grow headcount among other Google product companies, he added. Google Cloud is going to triple its sales team in India and add two more cloud regions to its Apac operations by the end of 2020.

The firm also announced that it has slashed the prices of its cloud-skilling programmes for the Indian market. According to analysts, Google Cloud lags behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the global market.

Harshman said the strategy to increase market share in India would be to address the needs of enterprises who are increasingly relying on multi-cloud strategies and to increase the penetration of its cloud-agnostic Anthos product.

“There’s not one CEO, CIO or CFO that I talk to in India or anywhere else who is saying I am only going to work with one (cloud) provider. Crux for them is skilling up on each cloud provider’s proprietary APIs, tech stack and that takes a long time and can be costly. This is where we think Anthos will be a differentiator,” he said.