For Internet giant Google, the next set of growth will come from cloud services and that emerging markets such as India and Japan including a few South East Asian countries will drive the market.

The search engine, which has been working on its cloud platform for the last 16 years, is planning to expand into these markets by opening cloud data centres targeted towards all kinds of businesses especially start-ups and financial companies like banks. Despite this the company is considered to be a late entrant into the market which has a market opportunity of $20 business and is likely to grow by 35 per cent next year, as per a study by Gartner.

The company is likely to open a cloud data centre in India in this year itself thus getting into a tough competition with the already dominant players Amazon and Microsoft.

While, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced to build data centres in 2016, leader in the cloud business, Microsoft, has already set up three data centers in India at Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. IBM also has opened one centre in Mumbai last year.

Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure, Google said in emerging economies like India adoption of cloud is faster. The growth of start-up ecosystem is a huge opportunity. However, traditional businesses and financial services companies are also moving to cloud.

The Alphabet company, which is hosted its first cloud user conference ever in the Sillicon Valley on Wednesday, made some major announcements that would help it eat into the market share of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Few things that Google announced were - machine learning tools with speech and image recognition features, Enterprise features for audit logging, identity management, security and encryption keys for cloud storage and compute, a monitoring tool called Google Stackdriver, and addition of new customers such as Disney and Coca Cola. The company already has successful start-ups such as Spotify and Snapchat as it clients.

The company's heightened focus on Cloud services also resonates from the fact that it has hired Diane Green, founder of VMware, to drive the business in December last. For Green, it is a serious business. "We would not be scaling so fast if it wasn't a serious business," she added.

Addressing the Google Cloud Products conference, CEO Sunder Pichai meanwhile said that in future almost everything will be done in the cloud as there will be no better way of doing things. Under the Indian-born CEO, Google is prioritizing the data processing technique across all of its products including cloud.

Despite all that, Google Cloud Platform needs more data centers, more applications, and more corporate accounts to gain market share and hence it plans to open 12 new cloud-focused data centers in the next 12 months.

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