Google’s new Cloud Region will take competition in the Indian cloud market a notch higher

According to recent reports from IT research firms including Gartner and Zinnov, the Indian public cloud market is expected to cross $1 B in 2016 and grow three folds by 2020. It’s a huge opportunity for global cloud service providers as well as local players to cash in on. If we look at the recent developments in the Indian public cloud market, we can see how competition is intensifying between the lead players in the game, especially – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google. Last year, Microsoft announced its three new datacenters in the country. Few months back AWS, known to be the pioneer in public cloud, came up with its new data center locations in India. IBM too has been ramping up its cloud efforts in India.

While we were wondering that why Google hasn’t so far made any announcements of investing in the local market, here comes another piece of news- Google is coming up with its new cloud region in the country.

A statement issued by the company reveals Google’s plans to open a new Google Cloud Region in Mumbai that is expected to be live in 2017. The India cloud region is aimed at offering Google Cloud Platform services to Indian developers and enterprise customers. This signals the advertising giant’s increasing interest to build its local presence to tap into the growing cloud opportunities in the country.

The announcement about the India cloud region was made at an event in San Francisco, called Horizon. The statement quoted Brian Stevens, Vice President, Google Cloud, speaking at Horizon, “By expanding to new regions, we deliver higher performance to customers. In fact, our recent expansion in Oregon resulted in up to 80% improvement in latency for customers. We look forward to welcoming customers to our new Cloud Regions as they become publicly available throughout 2017.”

There is a growing demand for cloud from the enterprise community in India that is clearly motivating cloud vendors to plan large-scale investments in the country. Reports suggest that having a local presence really gives these players an edge. Greyhound Research’s recent report around AWS’ new data center regions and its impact states some of the benefits that the company can now pass on to its customers. “The key technology benefits that the company can now offer include lower latency, data sovereignty and localised support. Greyhound Research believes this new region will lend AWS customers and partners the ability to migrate apps and workloads currently located in other regions,” states the report. The same would hold true for other players like Microsoft and Google as well.

The strategy is hence appealing to all the big players. Rajat Kohli, Engagement manager, Zinnov, adds, “Most of big players are actively expanding their footprint in India by establishing data centres to win the confidence of large enterprises including regulated verticals such as BFSI, Telecom.”

Additionally, Google will also be looking at developing its partner ecosystem In India that has also been an important growth strategy for its key competitors. With this development, Google certainly will be better positioned to fight it out more aggressively with the other internet heavyweights.