With technology tools like Machine Learning (ML), coupled stricter privacy policies, Google is hoping to woo enterprises in India, in the backdrop of competition from market leader Amazon and Microsoft.

Cloud computing, which has become a ‘cool’ thing is increasingly seeing companies adopt it as it offers the prospect of unlimited computing at a marginal cost. Basically, it is renting computers and storage over the Internet and pay based on subscription, instead of buying and managing the hardware or software.

This business, within Google has earned the sobriquet of being the most important business and India being one of the markets with a combination of start-ups and large enterprises are beginning to hop on to the cloud bandwagon.

As companies embrace the cloud, recently there have been several questions raised around privacy and security, in cases such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. “We have blocked millions of phishing messages and the way our privacy protocols are structured, it gives organisations a level of comfort,” Rick Harshman, MD, Asia-Pacific, Google Cloud, told BusinessLine .

Interoperability

Additionally, organisations can use technology from competition and run it on Google’s Cloud platform, which is called interoperability. This, according to Harshman is a key differentiator. Kuruvilla Markose, Chief Digital Officer, Titan agrees. “No one single company can do everything itself and needs the ecosystem help, which was one of the reasons we use Google Cloud,” he added.

While companies like Titan, which are using the omni channel route to sell their products, messaging apps like ShareChat are using Google Cloud to compute large data sets (Big Data) and use ML to generate new revenue streams. “In vernacular langauages in India, what sort of content needs to be pushed in tier-II and III towns and ML helps here,” said Bhanu Pratap Singh, Co-founder, CTO, ShareChat.

Cloud platform training

As more and more companies are taking advantage of what cloud computing, data analytics and machine learning can do for their businesses, the gap between the knowledge needed to move to the cloud and the demand for such skills has grown wider. To address this need, has Google collaborated with Coursera, an online education platform, to launch a series of on-demand Google Cloud Platform training, which includes Machine Learning with TensorFlow. “We are also launching our new Associate Cloud Engineer certification, which demonstrates mastery of fundamental GCP skills.

This push by Google needs to be seen in the backdrop of Amazon which has been credited with creating this market and having a wider choice of services in comparison to Google, which has resulted in being the default choice of a large number of companies- notably start-ups. In April, Amazon revealed its cloud computing unit was on track to be a $6-billion business with $1-billion in profit this year.

Google did not disclose the total number of users in its Cloud platform but said that Indian customers include a combination of old and new companies such as YES Bank, Hike, goibibo, Wipro, JSW and others.

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