It's official: Karan Bajwa is the India MD for Google Cloud

Google has appointed former IBM India country head as the managing director (MD) for its cloud computing division in India. TechCircle had reported last month that he was slated to take up the position.

Bajwa will be responsible for driving all revenue and go-to-market operations for the solution portfolio of Google Cloud, which includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and G Suite, the company said. It added that the field sales, partner and customer engineering organisations in India will also report to Bajwa. G-Suite includes products such as Gmail, Hangouts and Calendar.

Earlier this month, the Mountain View, California-based search giant said it would establish a second India cloud region in New Delhi next year, three years after it set up the first one in the country. 

Bajwa is a technology industry veteran, having spent nearly two decades in the sector, in senior executive roles across companies such as Microsoft and Cisco. In his last assignment as MD of information technology (IT) services and consulting firm IBM’s India operations, Bajwa steered the firm during a period of great change in the wider marketplace.

“Karan is a veteran in the industry with a proven track record of building and growing successful enterprise businesses. His experience will be a tremendous asset to Google Cloud’s business, our partners and our customers as we embark on this next phase of growth,” Rick Harshman, managing director for Google Cloud in the Asia Pacific region, said.

Google said that Bajwa will advise Google Cloud’s continued work with the local developer ecosystem. The company helps developers create enterprise apps on top of the GCP. He will also work with the India-based global system integrators (GSIs) such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro. GSIs play a key role in implementing, integrating and maintaining product companies’ solution offerings.

“This is a new challenge and I look forward to extending Google’s global momentum in India. Leveraging cloud computing technology to modernise and scale for growth is on the agenda of almost every enterprise CEO and CIO, and Google Cloud is committed to help every organisation accelerate their digital transformation,” Bajwa said.

Google's main competitors are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Cloud computing was a $9 billion revenue business for Google Cloud in the calendar year 2019, significantly smaller compared to aforementioned rivals.

AWS, Seattle headquartered Amazon’s cloud computing arm, reported $9 billion in revenue for the December 2019 quarter alone, which makes it 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.

Under the 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.