New cloud region will help customers build digital-first future: Bikram Singh Bedi, Google Cloud India

India is one of its fastest-growing markets for Google Cloud Platform. In July this year, the company launched a new cloud region in Delhi-NCR (National Capital Region) to meet the growing needs of its customers in India as well as the wider Asia Pacific region.  

This is the second such region in India after Mumbai, and the tenth in APAC.  

In an interview, Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India, explains the strategy to grow the India market, and value proposition of the new region.  

Edited excerpts:

Why did you launch this second cloud region in India? 

India is a strategic market for Google Cloud and we invested in our second cloud region to help customers and local partners build a digital first future. We are expanding our local infrastructure in response to customer demand since opening our Mumbai Cloud region in 2017. Delhi NCR is our 10th region in Asia Pacific and 26th globally.  

 A second region in India brings significant benefits to our customers in three important ways. First, it makes it easier and faster for Indian digital natives and traditional enterprises alike to leverage Google Cloud’s on-demand network that’s faster, more reliable and less expensive than one they could build themselves. 

Second, it provides additional disaster recovery options for our customers along with better control of their data through data residency, operational transparency, and privacy controls. And third, it delivers more choices for customers to store their data locally, enabling them to meet digital sovereignty requirements. This is especially important for those in regulated industries such as financial services and the public sector.    

Do you see increased adoption from the growing ecosystem of SMBs and startups in India?  

Businesses are continually concentrating on their core competencies. Hiring managed services such as cloud sourcing lowers operational costs while increasing efficiency. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are a substantial market for cloud-based solutions. Cloud has emerged as a distinct differentiator for SMBs.  

According to a Nasscom report, Indian SMBs are becoming progressively technically savvy, with over 60% of surveyed SMBs properly implementing cloud, albeit to various degrees of maturity. The research additionally states, SMBs have the potential to account for 28-30% of the public cloud market. We have dedicated teams working closely with the SMB segment to help them adopt a cloud first strategy.  

With other players like AWS also expanding their cloud regions, what is unique about your offering?  

Google Cloud’s mission is to accelerate every organisation’s ability to digitally transform and reimagine their business through data-powered innovation. We remain consistent with our clear strategy by focusing on six priority industries: financial services; telco, media entertainment and gaming; retail and CPG (consumer packaged goods); healthcare and life sciences; manufacturing and industrial; and public sector. Core differentiators of Google Cloud and the reason customers choose us are our flexibility and openness, commitment to multi-cloud, and insights from data. 

We are the leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and can put the power of Google’s data analytics behind them. Sustainability is on top-of-mind for customers, and we are the cleanest cloud in the industry having been carbon neutral since 2007. In terms of security, customers also love that they can protect their data with the same security tools built and used by Google.  

What’s your strategy to grow your market share in India?  

India is an important market for us and is one of the fastest growing cloud marketplaces in the world. The services by Google Cloud are utilized by our customers to scale their infrastructure and operations for a multitude of applications. We continue to scale our go-to-market effort in three ways. In terms of people, we continue to hire in sales, technical roles, customer service, and customer success teams to meet customer demand. 

In terms of partners, we continue to expand and mature our indirect distribution with a focused channel partnership program for resellers, system integrators, and independent software vendors. From a products point of view, we continue to expand cloud regions, increase differentiation of our products and solutions, and add new compliance certifications. According to Gartner, 81% of organizations are working with two or more public cloud providers. Our multi-cloud strategy provides companies the flexibility to use their preferred cloud for each workload while providing consistency and access to non-stop innovation.