Hyderabad, India — Google, the world’s largest search engine colossus is pinning hopes on the ballooning cloud computing market in India, on Thursday announced plans to invest heavily in cloud computing by setting up a center of excellence and double its engineering headcount in the country in next two years, with Hyderabad as its global hub for the purpose, a senior company official said in a statement.
The new center, to be set up in Hyderabad, would focus on cloud computing and develop applications for Google clients worldwide. The firm has revealed plans to significantly recruit 300 engineers in couple of years to increase its presence in India and strengthen Hyderabad as its largest research and development center in the world.
Peeyush Ranjan, Managing Director, Google India R&D, addressing a news conference in Hyderabad on Thursday. Photo Credit: MOHAMMED YOUSUF
“We will hire hundreds of engineers. They will be generalists, not specialists as it will suit our requirement,” Google India’s head of engineering Peeyush Ranjan told reporters here on Thursday.
The search engine leader presently has 300 engineers working on cutting edge products in its Hyderabad and Bangalore centers and the company’s overall headcount in the country is close to 2,000, Ranjan said. He did not disclose the size of investment that Google plans to make on cloud computing R&D activities in India.
Cloud computing was set to bring paradigm shift in businesses as more and more enterprises were looking for deploying the technology which facilitates anytime and anywhere access on any device. Cloud computing is delivers web-based procedures, whereby shared resources, software, and information are rendered to computers and other devices such as smart phones on demand over the Internet.
Google already handles cloud computing centers in Mountain View in California and New York but the Hyderabad center is the largest in terms of the number of technologists working here. Besides, Google India says it already serves more than one-lakh enterprises customers in India were using cloud technology at present.
Ranjan said that he was very confident over business prospects in cloud computing from India’s price-conscious small and medium businesses. SMB’s are showing interest in adopting cloud computing model as they can dispense with issues of maintaining data centers and software upgrades.
While the engineering center in Bangalore is working on cloud computing as well as search, ads, maps and news, the Hyderabad center would act as center of excellence for Google’s cloud computing R&D activities since it has developed several enterprise offerings and innovations and has a deep pool of engineering talent, added Rajan.
“The work being done in these two centers are global in nature and the technologies they are developing are for the business globally,” he said.
Describing the role of Hyderabad center, he said it was already working on several important areas like Google Applications and it would be the Google’s largest center for cloud computing playing a significant role in the evolution of cloud-based technologies.
Google Apps, the company’s most popular product that enables businesses to shift into the cloud, have about 25 million active users currently.
“We are signing about 3,000 businesses every day and we are approaching the market through about 1,000 authorized resellers,” he said.
According to Ranjan, the IT major is gearing up for tapping the market is said to be still in its nascent phase. He said the company is keen on putting in place the technologies and its engineering team to cater to the market demands. There is an administrative control panel in Bangalore which manages the business of a customer once it is up in clouds, he added.
“We target the SMB market in India for cloud. The country like China is a very price-sensitive market and the small and medium businesses are showing interest in adopting the cloud model primarily due to the cost advantages at various points of its implementation,” Ranjan said.
Google recently unveiled WebP, the image compressing technology that was unfurled to compete with Jpeg format widely used on the net at present. The open source down-loadable application was set to become the de facto standard for images as its new (lossy) image compression technology would reduce the storage size of images significantly by removing details that did not make visual impact and, thereby, make the web much faster.