Google LCC announced its partnership with India’s third-largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel, to offer cloud services to small- and medium-sized businesses.
As the multinational tech company pushes for expansion in emerging tech markets, like India, it sees through the growing need of companies to shift to cloud storage. The new partnership, effective January 20, 2020, allows Airtel to offer Google’s G Suite plan to enterprises, part of its ICT portfolio.
According to Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian, “The combination of G Suite’s collaboration and productivity tools with Airtel’s digital business offerings will help accelerate digital innovations for thousands of Indian businesses.”
Since early January this year, Google has been making large movements to improve and sell its cloud services. Recently, the company has partnered with several tech companies, including IBM, to enhance its cloud services offers.
The G-Suite is a set of smart applications like Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Calendar, which are available to use online, simultaneously. According to Google, startups can benefit from this technology, in the way that internal operations can be improved.
Bharti Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal is positive about the partnership, saying, “We are pleased to further strengthen our deep relationship with Google Cloud and build products and services aimed at transforming Indian businesses.”
Keeping Up With Competitors
While this move is one of the firsts for Google, Microsoft has been doing it all along. In fact, last year, Microsoft has partnered with Reliance Jio to sell cloud services to micro-enterprises in India. Reliance Jio is India’s largest telecom provider, which serves the biggest businesses in India.
Microsoft and Reliance Jio announced their partnership last August 2019, citing the expansion of service as the main reason.
Meanwhile, Amazon is also moving out of the shadow, investing $1 billion to India operations, helping millions of merchants become online. The company is already offering cloud services, AWS (Amazon Web Services) to services clients in need of storage and information technology solutions.
India is a huge market because it is slowly moving online in recent years. According to NASSCOM, the cloud market is expected to grow in the coming years and will be worth more than $7 billion come 2022. Meanwhile, the Software as a Services (SaaS) market is expected to hit the $3.5 billion mark.
Airtel handles 325 million subscribers in India and serves almost 2,500 large enterprises and over half a million small- and medium-sized startups.
