Google to open first India data centre in Mumbai

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the cloud computing service run by Alphabet Inc, will open its first data centre in Mumbai by the end of this year.

Responding to a query from DH, Google Cloud Asia Pacific Managing Director Rick Harshman said with the Google Cloud India region going live in Mumbai before the end of this year, enterprises in India will soon be able to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits uniquely offered by our Google Cloud Platform services.

"When live, the region will offer several services including computing, big data, storage and networking," he said. The Mumbai data centre will be the company’s fifth in Asia after Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and Taiwan.

Mohit Pande, Google Cloud’s India country manager, said the company is aggressively expanding its cloud offering in India. "Indian developers, coders and software companies are becoming more interested in Google cloud offering compared with other competitors Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc and Microsoft Corp," he said.

India has a huge potential in data centre services as the public cloud is gaining momentum in the country. "Even though globally cloud adoption by companies are only 5% of the total requirement. The data centre will help the company to deliver cloud services like storage, networking and data services out of Mumbai," an analyst said.

While Microsoft and AWS who joined the fray in 2008 and 2002 respectively are way ahead of the competition. "AWS dominates the cloud market with about 34% of the market share. Other players including Microsoft, IBM and Google have a share of 11%, 8% and 5% respectively," states Synergy Research.

While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are doubling in size, IBM continues to dominate in the hosted private cloud and AWS is still over three times the size of its nearest competitor.

Google Cloud Platform has added new regions in Frankfurt (Germany) and Sao Paulo (Brazil). GCP has 12 regions, 36 zones and over 100 points of presence globally. Along with India centre, GCP also plans to expand its presence in Los Angeles in the United States and Montreal in Canada.