Google to develop nextgen tech for internet expansion

Rajan Anandan, Vice President and Managing Director of Google South East Asia, said the company will focus on next generation technologies, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP), to bring on board the next 400 million users to internet in the country.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, Anandan said the company is tied up with the startup ecosystem to develop new technologies to expand the reach of internet, as mobile penetration is growing in India.

“We continue to work on a lot of technologies so that internet should work on different geographies in India, where language diversity is a differentiating factor. Access works and open source platform will help us expand the reach of internet,” he said.

Rajan said that NLP is an underlying technology, and Google India has been working on 11 different languages in India. NLP deals with interaction between computers and humans, enabling computer systems to understand human language and respond adequately.

Anandan said that India is expected to double its internet user-base to 700 million by 2020, and bringing the last 400 million people who are illiterate will be a bigger challenge.

“Since India is the third largest internet ecosystem in the world, Google is committed to innovation where startups have a major role to play. So we have roped in industry bodies, incubation centres, and are organising hackathons. We have invested in four startups through Google Capital,” he said.

Commenting on the growth opportunity of startup in software as a service (SaaS) in the next 10 years, he said that India can play a major role as there is a hyper growth and adoption by SMBs of this service.

“SMBs will contribute to more than 75% of the public cloud revenues driving the global SaaS industry to $132 billion revenues by 2020, of which SMB SaaS is expected to reach $76 billion,” he said.

DH News Service

Anandan also said that Indian startups have the opportunity to grab 8% of this revenue by creating purpose-built innovative solutions targeted at SMBs globally.
“In a market with demand fulfillment largely led by US, India’s competitive advantages will help SaaS companies see strong growth and create $50 Billion in value over the next 10 years. This is also reinforced by the fact that venture funding for SaaS solution startups exceed $18 billion in the last four years ,” said Anandan.

Google India and Accel Partners also brought out a joint report on the growth opportunities of SaaS business vertical.