Indian centres to lead in cloud computing: Google

BANGALORE: Google’s engineering initiatives in cloud computing (enterprise solutions ) will be led by its centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The company’s president for enterprise, Dave Girouard, who was in Bangalore on Tuesday, said India would be a ‘ Centre of Excellence’ for the company in cloud computing.

“India will become the largest enterprise development centre for us,” he said. Enterprise work also happens in Google’s centres in Mountain View in California, Kirkland in the state of Washington , and Stockholm.

Google has some 300 engineers in India and Girouard said the company intends to hire “hundreds” more. The Hyderabad centre already has a focus on cloud computing. Bangalore is currently focused on work related to search, advertisements and mobile, and the plan now is to create a cloud computing team here too.

Google’s cloud computing offerings are partly an extension of its consumer offerings — like Gmail, Docs and Calendar — to businesses. Docs include web-based documents, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations that let users edit the same file at the same time.

Calendar is a web-based application that enables employees to easily schedule appointments , overlay multiple calendars to see when people are available, integrate with your email system, and share project calendars across the company or with co-workers .
The company also offers an application called Google Sites that is an easy way to create secure web pages for intranets and team projects, and an application for private, hosted video sharing. Most such applications are currently licensed by companies and hosted in in-house data centres.



Google is trying to persuade companies to move everything to the cloud, so that companies can dispense with issues of maintaining a data centre and doing software upgrades.

Google started its enterprise initiative only three years ago, in 2007. The company says it now has 2 million businesses , with 25 million active users, as customers. In India, those numbers are 100,000 and 1 million respectively. “Compared to a year ago, we are now seeing three times as many businesses signing up for our cloud offering,” Girouard said.

As part of the initiative, Peeyush Ranjan, who leads Google’s enterprise related engineering efforts worldwide, has relocated to Bangalore, from the company’s Mountain View headquarters.