Sundar Pichai in India, to share key initiatives for SMBs in Delhi today

After the India visit of Travis Kalanick, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of US-based taxi aggregator Uber, Google CEO Sundar Pichai would be in New Delhi for an event on small and medium businesses (SMB) – one of the new focus areas of the global technology major.

According to sources, Pichai could possibly meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant as well. Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is likely to meet Pichai at the event where he has been invited to speak.

Sources say Pichai is already in India. He would end his trip with an event in Delhi and then go to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur – his alma mater where he would be felicitated and then have a fireside chat at the venue. This is Pichai’s third official visit to India since he took over as Google CEO.

Pichai has a BTech degree from IIT Kharagpur. “Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and distinguished alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, has expressed his desire to visit the campus in the first week of January 2017,” its director P P Chakrabarti said, according to a few news reports. Pichai graduated in 1993 with a BTech in metallurgical and materials engineering.

According to sources, Google is planning to launch a series of products for the SMB segment. The company is looking at small businesses as a major source of revenue in the near future. With products such as Google for Business and a new Cloud region, the company wants to tap into the multi-million dollar opportunity in India. Its products compete with those from the stables of global giants like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

As it opens its first data centre in India this year, the technology major is looking for major expansion in the region, with plans to hire thrice the number of people, as well as reach out to start-ups and small and medium enterprises.

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

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. The company is trying to expand more in tier-II and tier-III towns and bring in more small entreprises into the fold.