Cloud customers want solutions, not infrastructure

Cloud customers are no longer asking for servers and storage, they are looking for solutions to their problems, said Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director of Google Cloud India, in an interaction. Cloud, he noted, was largely used as infrastructure for the first few days of 2010-12. Around the middle of the last decade, the cloud became a means of making operations more efficient. Today it is synonymous with digital transformation.

So Google Cloud combines its first-class infrastructure with industry solutions. Even the CTOs Google Clouds office (OCTO) is developing solutions with many customers around the world, including in India. The CTOs office is a diverse team of domain experts and technologists. You work with clients to define new architectures.

The OCTO includes technologists from identity management and AI to industrial computing and serverless architectures. Google Cloud counts Freshworks, Ather Energy, ShareChat and ErosNow among its customers in India. The division has engineering centers in cities in India, and Bedi said these centers will cope with the demand for specific solutions. Many of them can be carried into the world, he said.

Google is a pretty distant third, but the business has been growing rapidly since Thomas Kurian took over as CEO in January 2019. During the recent launch of a second cloud region in India, Kurian said India is one of the fastest growing countries for its business. The new region enables Google Cloud customers operating in India to benefit from lower latency and higher performance from their cloud-based workloads. Bedi said the company in India is hiring in technology, sales, customer success and customer service.

These are people who work with customers, understand their environment, develop solutions, and then help them to be successful. When it comes to collaboration tools, says Bedi, there is a clear shift among customers from old, legacy collaboration systems to newer ones. Google has its workspace, and then there’s Microsoft Teams and Zoom. When looking at tools like this, Bedi says, the first thing customers look at is calendar, mailing, productivity solutions, and so on.

“But today customers are more focused on security. Remote working really made it an open environment and security had become a huge concern,” he said. Google Workspace works within the corporate environment and customers, Bedi said, have a high level of trust. TTB