Google Cloud Seeks Big Government Contracts To Script India Growth

Google Cloud, which is in stiff competition with cloud service companies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, said that it is now working to tap into the burgeoning cloud  service opportunities in the government sector in India. The platform aims to help government clients have scalable, agile and secure multi-cloud experience, with a special focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities.

Nitin Bawankule, director, Google Cloud, India, reportedly said that the time is ripe for the company to now deeply explore the government sector as various state governments are moving fast on initiatives such as smart cities, and have plans to move their workloads to on-premise storage, as well as the public cloud.

He further shared that Google is working closely with the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) to achieve the full Cloud Service Provider (CSP) empanelment. Bawankule emphasised that the company is still scratching the surface as opportunities continue to remain huge in the Indian market.

He said that Google will soon have dedicated sales teams working on the government vertical in the country. The company is bullish on big Indian enterprises, SMBs, unicorns and startups.

“We have ramped up efforts in the last 12-18 months to make our presence felt across the industry verticals. The Indian government sector is the next big thing and we will have more to share on that front soon,” said Bawankule.

India is one of the largest and fastest-growing cloud services markets in the Asia Pacific, second only to China. Google Cloud claims to have seen increased adoption in India’s retail and media entertainment segments.

A CII and KPMG report entitled ‘The Indian Cloud Revolution’ said that cloud technology, enabled by IT and bolstered by a sound telecommunications network, can herald innumerable solutions to enable telemedicine, set up remote classrooms, create health and skills databases of citizens, and create a new cloud-based services industry for employment generation.

The global companies are now working to align with the government requirements which calls for keeping data generated about Indian customers within the country. In May, Amazon Web Services (AWS), added a third cluster of data centres, known as an ‘Availability Zone’ (AZ) to the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. This will help the company accommodate a growing number of customers and increasing usage of the region.

According to a recent NASSCOM report, India’s cloud spending in 2018 was estimated to be $2.5 Bn and is projected to grow at 30% per year to reach around $ 7.1Bn by 2022.