Public Cloud could just be Google's next rainmaker

BENGALURU: Google is betting on its managed services offering to act as a key differentiator in its battle for public cloud supremacy with rivals Amazon and Microsoft in the country.

“One of the big differentiators for us is managed services, which takes away the complexity for customers while allowing them to ramp up really fast. It provides global scale while reducing costs for customers,“ Mohit Pande, country head-India, Google Cloud told ETtech.

Pande said the availability of managed services was one of the key reasons it recently landed SoftBank-backed messaging app Hike Messenger as a customer for Google Cloud.

Hike's entire messaging application and network is now running on Google Cloud.

“We have migrated pretty much everything to Google Cloud except our payment infrastructure.“ said Vishwanath Ramarao, vice president Engineering and Technology at Hike Messenger.

“While we can assemble the same service by ourselves using raw virtual machines, we wanted to accelerate towards the fu ture a lot faster which is enabled by managed services,“ he added.

Ramarao said that managed services helps them scale the product in a much simpler manner, especially when they have to tackle with sudden traffic peaks on occasions like festivals among others. Hike users share over one billion messages on a daily basis and more than 40 billion messages a month, the company had said in August last year. Google, which has invested $30 billion on its cloud platform over the past three years in building infrastruc ture, is set to open its first cloud region in India later this later this year.