Google to set up data centre in India by 2017

Google will set up its first India data centre in Mumbai by 2017, to take on global players Microsoft and Amazon, who have a presence in the country, and allow local customers to host their applications on the internet.

Google controls the market in India in search, e-mail and on smartphones through its Android operating system. It also has a significant presence in offering enterprise applications such as e-mail and other services, but is behind Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud business.

Amazon has three data centres (Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai) with more than 75,000 customers, including Ola, Tata Motors and NDTV on its cloud.

Last year, Microsoft set up three data centres in India, offering its Azure cloud to local customers.

For now, Google hosts applications of its Indian customers such as Wipro, Ashok Leyland, Smartshift by Mahindra & Mahindra, Dainik Bhaskar Group and INshorts.com on its global cloud platform. Google expects an India presence will help service local customers faster. Google calls its data centre Cloud Region.

“By expanding to new regions, we deliver higher performance to customers," said Brian Stevens, vice-president, Google Cloud, in a statement.

“In fact, our recent expansion in Oregon resulted in up to 80 per cent improvement in latency for customers.” India's public cloud services market is projected to grow 30.4 per cent to reach $1.26 billion in 2016.

At the same time, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.2 per cent to $208.6 billion in 2016, up from $178 billion last year.

“Google realises that it has lost critical time, and Microsoft and AWS are already ahead it in the Indian market. It is investing in infrastructure — that is, data centres — in the country because it will increase stickiness for its clients,” said Sanchit Gogia, chief analyst and CEO of research firm Greyhound Research. “Investing in a data centre is a huge shot in the arm for the company, because this way it can create the entire ecosystem around cloud and have people work on its Google ecosystem.” “It is evident that cloudification is gaining momentum in India. Small and medium businesses were the early adopters, and then came large corporates, who have had their own internal infrastructure, shifting to the cloud,” said P N Sudarshan, senior director, Deloitte India. “Now cloud will have much more rapid adoption in Digital India, in G2C services, because of data centre localisation.”

Indian information technology services firms such as TCS, Wipro, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant are partners with Google, which help their clients migrate to the cloud.

India’s public cloud services market is projected to grow 30.4 per cent to reach $1.26 billion in 2016