Google augments regional cloud team
Google is expanding headcount at its local cloud team threefold to capitalise on growth in cloud computing in Southeast Asia, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation.
Globally, Google has spent US$30 billion (992.3 billion baht) on cloud infrastructure in the past three years.
“Thailand is one of the growth countries with a remarkable pace of cloud computing adoption, i n particular enterprises such as banks and financial services that are running experiments for their new services,” Tim Synan, head of Google Cloud in Southeast
Asia, said at the initial Cloud Summit in Bangkok.
More than 2,000 executives, customers and partners took part in the forum at Siam Paragon.
The company is tripling its local cloud workforce from last year after customer numbers grew three times in Southeast Asia this year.
Apart from fintech, digital transformation is leading large enterprises to adopt the cloud, especially in telecom, healthcare, travel, manufacturing, e-commerce, transport, Mr Synan said.
The future of the cloud usage model includes modernised apps in the cloud, opensource software and applied machine learning.
“Business needs predictive ability to gain customer insights so that machine learning will generate a huge benefit,” Mr Synan said.
Startups are a key target group for cloud. In Southeast Asia, startups have received about $10 billion in funds from venture capitalists.
Google has embraced AI and machine learning to add value to its cloud services.
Globally, the tech giant has 17 regional bases for cloud services, of which five are in Asia and the Pacific: Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and Mumbai.
The company will open three more regions soon, in Hong Kong, Osaka and Indonesia.
Google brings in more than $1 billion from cloud business per quarter worldwide after three years of investment in infrastructure and footprint expansion.
“With the rise of cloud adoption, data engineers and data scientists will have future job opportunities,” Mr Synan said.