Impromptu: Co-creating The Future

Companies and organisations across every industry are accelerating their shift to digital solutions, turning to cloud technology to solve complex business challenges and explore unique opportunities amidst changing customer demands and regulatory frameworks. Navigating the past two years has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with these swinging demands and economic uncertainty. We spoke with Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director, Google Cloud India, to get a sense of the overall business in India, along with strategies to solidify its position further. Excerpts

Tell us about Google Cloud’s business in India. What have been its key highlights in the past, especially in the past two years, when the strength and potential of technology were substantially tested?
Technology has played a critical role during this time and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. India is a strategic market for us and we will continue to grow and invest in the success of our customers here. Some highlights include:
* In the last two years, we announced our valued collaboration with organisations of all sizes
* Last year, we launched our Delhi NCR cloud region. Delhi NCR joins 28 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers
* In October 2021, Google Cloud committed to training more than 40 million new people globally on Google Cloud skills as part of our Cloud Skills Boost program which many in India continue to take advantage of
* We also recently announced that we will open a new office in Pune and that the first Googlers in the space in its cloud product engineering, technical support and global delivery center organisations

It has been a year since you took charge of the company in India. With your previous experience in technology, sales, strategy and leadership roles, how will you leverage this at Google Cloud? What gaps are there to probably fill?
I continue to be inspired by our dynamic organisation and at the opportunity to leverage my experience to help scale our business by focusing on our people, partners and products. Decades of experience have taught me that customers must continue to be at the heart of everything we do—we are their trusted partner in co-creating the future. As an organisation, we are committed to listening to our customers to learn from them, aligning across the organisation to win together, delivering results for customers quickly and being accountable for their success.

What will be your mantra for Google Cloud’s transformational growth?
Looking ahead in 2022, we believe the best way to predict the future is to create it. The situation with Covid continues to be dynamic in India and the rest of the world. Countries, communities and companies cannot take things for granted; some are on the road to recovery — others are on the road to revolution. Companies must continue on the path of digital transformation that they started in 2020, and our customers need a true partner to solve their future needs and opportunities.

What are some of the key announcements that we can expect in the coming days?
Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. We will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic
recovery.

What are some of the challenges and silver linings in this space? What are some of the trends that will float in the coming years?
While there is a rapid upsurge in the demand for cloud technologies, it’s also important to emphasise that it’s still early days for the cloud. We’re currently operating in a multicloud world, where more organisations are learning the importance of having a multi-cloud setup. Gartner estimates that 81 per cent of organisations are working with two or more public cloud providers and going forward, we would expect to see continued growth in this sector.

What will your strategy be to solidify your presence in the Indian market? What are some of the insights that you have gathered about the Indian audience?
India is an important market for us and is one of the fastest-growing cloud marketplaces in the world. We are helping our customers to build a digital-first future and helping them scale their infrastructure and operations for a multitude of applications. Our USP continues to be:
* Delivering a data cloud that provides deep insights into their organisation
* Having an open cloud with the flexibility to integrate across multiple providers, so customers don’t have vendor lock-in
* Having a collaboration cloud to connect teams and accelerate workforce collaboration, which is vital as the world moves to a hybrid working.

A trusted cloud to ensure important data stays protected.