Google to set up data centre in India by 2017

India's public cloud services market is projected to grow 30.4 per cent to reach $1.26 billion in 2016

Google will set up its first India data centre in Mumbai by 2017, hoping to take on global incumbents such as Microsoft and Amazon, who have a presence in the country, and allow local customers to host their applications on the internet.

Google controls a majority market share in India in search, email and on smartphones through is Android operating system. It also has a significant presence in offering enterprise applications such as mail and other services, but lags behind Microsoft and Amazon in its cloud business.

Amazon has three data centres, one each in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, with over 75,000 customers, including taxi hailing app Ola, Tata Motors and television network NDTV, on its cloud. Last year, Microsoft set up three data centres in India offering its Azure cloud to local customers.

Google, which already hosts applications of its Indian customers such as Wipro, Ashok Leyland, Smartshift by Mahindra & Mahindra, Dainik Bhaskar Group and INshorts.com on its global cloud platform, expects a India presence to service local customers faster. Google calls it data centre Cloud Region.

"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," said Brian Stevens, vice-president, Google Cloud, in a statement.

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 start-up community continues to grow, Cloud Platform provides the full stack of services to build, test and deploy their applications, the firm said.

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. In India, Google already has deep partnerships with a multitude of born-in-the-cloud partners including Searce Co-Sourcing, Cloud Cover, PowerUp Cloud and MediaAgility as well as global partners like Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra, PwC and Cognizant. 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 firm said.