Google to open 'India Cloud Region' to help customers, developers

In a fresh move to offer secured and improved cloud services to Indian developers and enterprise customers, Google has announced to open a new "Google Cloud Region" which is expected to go live in Mumbai in 2017.

Announcing the "Google Cloud Regions" at an event in San Francisco titled "Horizon" on Thursday, the company unveiled the locations of eight new Cloud Regions - Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, Sao Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt.

The local region will help make Google Cloud Platform services even faster for Indian customers, enhancing differentiators that are already motivating companies to choose Google as their partner, the company said in a statement.

With more than one billion end users, Google Cloud has gained significant traction in India and across the world.

Globally, key customers already leveraging the benefits of Google Cloud Platform include Snap Inc (formerly SnapChat), Niantic Labs (Pokemon Go), Telus International, and Evernote.

"In India too, we have seen great customer momentum with thousands of customers including major brands like Wipro, Ashok Leyland, Smartshift by Mahindra and Mahindra, Dainik Bhaskar Group and INshorts.com building on Google Cloud Platform," the statement said.

The Google Cloud Platform takes the infrastructure, machine learning and networking services used to power Google services and makes them available to businesses and developers to build high performance applications and data analysis at a low cost.

As India's startup community continues to grow, Cloud Platform provides the full stack of services to build, test and deploy their applications.

"By expanding to new regions, we deliver higher performance to customers. In fact, our recent expansion in Oregon resulted in up to 80 per cent improvement in latency for customers. We look forward to welcoming customers to our new Cloud Regions as they become publicly available throughout 2017," said Brian Stevens, vice president, Google Cloud, while speaking at at Horizon.

In addition to its focus on Indian customers, Google is continuing to build its partner ecosystem to support customers as they move to the cloud.

Google already has partnerships with Searce Co-Sourcing, Cloud Cover, PowerUp Cloud and MediaAgility as well as global partners like Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra, PwC and Cognizant in the country.

"The opening of the cloud region opens up newer opportunities for several new cloud partners who will benefit from building their services on Google Cloud," the company said.

At Horizon, Google also unveiled G Suite.

Previously called Google Apps for Work, G Suite encompasses a set of intelligent apps - Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and more - designed to bring people together, with real-time collaboration built in from the start.