Search giant Google to double India engenieering staff

Search giant Google Inc is looking at doubling its engineering staff in India in the next couple of years to further strengthen its enterprise cloud computing offerings, said Peeyush Ranjan, managing director (R&D), Google India.

The California-based company’s existing staff strength is 2,000 in India, including 300 engineers between its Hyderabad and Bangalore centres. The Indian engineers are developing applications for cloud computing, search, maps and ads.

“Our plan is to make Hyderabad as a centre of excellence for cloud computing. We are optimistic about the growth of cloud activities in the country and we would be hiring more to serve our clientele who are seeing a fundamental shift towards cloud for new businesses,” Ranjan told mediapersons here on Thursday.

The recruitment initiative will make Hyderabad the largest cloud computing site for Google. Cloud computing, an emerging technology, is Internet-based computing, where shared resources such as software, electricity and information are provided to computers on-demand.

Stating that the company would consider setting up teams for other broad product groups such as search when the need arises, Ranjan denied rumours that half of Facebook’s employees in India were Google veterans. “It (poaching by Facebook) will be a low double-digit figure. We are on a hiring spree to spur our business in India,” a company official said.

Google has more than 25 million active users including eight million active education users. “More than 3,000 businesses are being signed up every day, and more than 100 third-party installable applications are available in the Google Apps Marketplace,” Ranjan said.

To make web browsing much faster, Google India had recently launched a new image compression technology – WebP (Web Photo). WebP, which competes with Jpeg (Joint Photographic Exports Group), currently the de facto standard for images, will reduce the byte size of web photos allowing websites to load faster than before.