Watch: Erica Brescia and Maneesh Sharma on GitHub’s strategy to build its India community

After being in the business for more than a decade with 40 million developers reportedly using its platform, Git repository hosting service GitHub recently announced plans to set up an Indian subsidiary in the coming months. The company’s public repositories in the country showed a sharp 75% hike last year, while its developer base grew 22% in the same period. 

Since its acquisition by Microsoft in October 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub set its sights on developing its Indian community in a bid to tap into the country’s enterprises and its large talent pool. It aims to build its community, engineering, sales, support, marketing and services teams here in the next few months. 

“We are starting with two offices in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, and expect to have about 200 employees by the end of the year,” chief operating officer Erica Brescia told TechCircle in a recent interview.  

Brescia heads the support, development and workplace teams, while former Adobe executive Maneesh Sharma handles the Indian operations as country manager. 

Bresica and Sharma spoke at length about the GitHub developer ecosystem, the potential in India, their favorite GitHub projects and how the company stores and protects its source code in the Arctic, should a global catastrophe hit us in the future.