India is on the forefront of cloud adoption: Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India

The Covid-19 pandemic became a major accelerator for cloud adoption, with businesses continuing to invest in cloud infrastructure, tools, and software to strengthen their business operations, says Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India. An industry veteran, he set up the AWS business in India and was the head of India and South Asia for six years. He has also held various leadership positions at IBM and Oracle. “We expect cloud infrastructure to expand even faster for rapid digital innovation,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interview. Excerpts:

What kind of growth has Google Cloud seen in the Indian market?
India is a crucial market for us since it is one of the fastest growing cloud marketplaces. Our customers use Google Cloud to grow their infrastructure and operations for a myriad of applications. We recently launched our second cloud region in the country. The Covid-19 pandemic has become an accelerator for cloud adoption, with businesses continuing to invest in cloud infrastructure, tools, and software to strengthen business operations. We have seen a massive uptick in various sectors such as automation, manufacturing and education and this just solidifies the need of organisations to choose cloud services.

How will Indian businesses benefit from the new cloud region?
The Delhi NCR Cloud region is our tenth cloud region in Asia Pacific and our 26th worldwide. While this is a significant step forward for the company, the cloud region’s primary benefactors will continue to be our customers in the country. Google Cloud customers will now experience low latency and high performance of cloud-based apps and data. With three availability zones, the area is optimised for high availability. Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery are among the key products offered through this addition.

How has cloud adoption among enterprises evolved in India?
A few years ago, cloud computing revolved around the ease of using storage, servers, and running data centres more efficiently. Today, it has become a pivotal part of helping Indian enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journey through platform, infrastructure, and industry solutions. The latest forecast from Gartner predicts that expenditure on public cloud services in India will total $4.4 billion by the end of 2021, a 31.4% increase from 2020—demonstrating that the country’s digital footprint is rapidly expanding.

Businesses of all sizes continue to embrace new cloud-based digital applications and collaboration tools for seamless communication and processes in a hybrid-work environment. Over the last two years, we have seen a steady rise in cloud adoption with Google Cloud helping organisations from diverse sectors, such as telecommunications, broadcasting, e-commerce, and fintech, move to the cloud and digitise. By leveraging cloud capabilities, these companies have been able to drive innovations, create new business practices, reduce costs, and develop seamless customer experiences.

We have also seen the ecosystem grow, with enterprises adopting multi-cloud architectures to prioritise robustness, agility, and configure their cloud capabilities by identifying and employing customised elements from multiple service providers to meet their unique needs – allowing them flexibility and quick response to the end-user. We will continue to witness this growth trajectory in the market as more companies move to cloud.

Any new customers that you have onboarded this year?
In June 2021, we announced that Google Cloud would provide a fully automated lifecycle management solution for Reliance Jio’s 5G infrastructure. The telco’s 5G service will be able to fulfill consumer needs thanks to our extensive expertise and innovation, and its core retail operations will also be migrated to our cloud infrastructure. Among others, Google Cloud’s technology enables Groww to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users. InMobi Group’s smartphone lock screen content provider Roposo is using Google Cloud to scale an AI-powered personalised content platform to support 120+ million daily active users. Viacom18 Media turned to Google Cloud to realise the potential of the Voot digital video-on-demand streaming service to identify profitable customer cohorts and organic growth generated by its content decisions.

Eros Now is using Google Cloud AI and machine learning to automate subtitling of a range of movies and original content, with its cloud investment spanning infrastructure, modelling and running of workloads. Among our other key customers are Zeotap, GR Infrastructure and Sterlite Technologies.

What are Google Cloud’s key differentiators as compared to competitors?
Google Cloud’s mission is to accelerate every organisation’s ability to digitally transform and reimagine their business through data-powered innovation. We are focused on the six priority industries: financial services, telco, media & entertainment, and gaming; retail and CPG; healthcare & life sciences; manufacturing & industrial; and public sector.

Our multi-cloud strategy provides companies the freedom to use their preferred cloud for each workload while providing consistency and access to non-stop innovation through technologies including: Anthos for application hosting and centralised management, Apigee for API management, and BigQuery and Looker for analytics. We also have a number of new and differentiated AI/ML-based industry specific solutions, such as Lending Doc AI, Product discovery and Contact Center AI to enhance our offerings for our user base.