Google Cloud to have second India cloud region in Delhi in 2021

Google will establish its second India cloud region in Delhi in 2021. The cloud centre comes three years after the Mountain View, California headquartered technology company set up its first one here.

The new cloud region will expand Google’s existing network. The company currently has eight regions in the Asia Pacific and 22 regions globally. 

Google Cloud will also launch its second such cloud region in Australia and Canada, and its first in Qatar.

Google's main competitors are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure. 

Microsoft has three centres in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. Amazon also has three centres, all in the Mumbai region. 

Other cloud players who have recently set up cloud centres in Mumbai are Chinese ecommerce major Alibaba and enterprise software giant and database giant Oracle.

Customer demand, as well as local data localisation rules for certain industries such as the financial sector or public sector companies, have increased the need for new data centres in India. A local data centre helps cloud companies reduce latencies. 

According to Google, the cloud regions bring Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services to enterprises and government organisations. Its cloud infrastructure helps lawmakers regulate industries such as healthcare and financial services across India. This will also facilitate enterprises to enable geographically separate in-country disaster recovery for the customers’ mission-critical applications, the company said. 

Google has been aggressively trying to grow its cloud business in the country. Last month, TechCircle reported that former IBM country head Karan Bajwa is headed to the India cloud computing business in a senior leadership role.

“Every organisation’s ability to transform through data-powered innovation with leading infrastructure, platform, industry solutions and expertise designed to meet our customers where they are on their journey to the cloud,” Rick Harshman, managing director at Google Cloud for Asia Pacific said.  

Under the new global Indian-origin CEO Thomas Kurian, who joined the company from enterprise giant Oracle a year ago, Google Cloud has been on an acquisition and hiring spree. Cloud computing was a $9 billion revenue business at Google Cloud for the calendar year 2019, significantly smaller compared to rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. 

AWS, Seattle headquartered Amazon's cloud computing arm, reported $9 billion in revenues for the December 2019 quarter alone, which makes its 3.5 times the size of Google Cloud. Redmond headquartered Microsoft clocked more than $9 billion during the December 2019 quarter in Azure revenues. This includes the cloud subscription revenue of Microsoft's Office 365 and other products, which are available on the cloud. 

Google Cloud has also seen some top-level churn in India. Last September, country director Nitin Bawankule left to join Disney's video streaming platform Hotstar as the head of ad sales. The position has been vacant since then. 

While Google Cloud’s India revenues are not known, the company is a strong player in this market behind AWS and Azure. Bawankule was previously the company's director for ecommerce and classifieds, indicating his lack of immediate experience in working with enterprise markets.

Google's products such as search, mail and maps command about 90% of the India market as does the mobile software operating system, Android, which runs most smartphones in the country. The company, along with social media giant Facebook, controls the country's internet advertising market as well.

Software developers working on cloud applications, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are driving their enterprises in India to embrace Google Cloud. This is in line with their technological preferences that work best on the platform, Harshman had told TechCircle in a recent interview.