Nitin Bawankule appointed as India country head for Google Cloud

Google has appointed Nitin Bawankule as the India country head for Google Cloud.

Bawankule will take over from Mohit Pande who has quit the company. He will report to Rick Harshman, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud.

Bawankule has been with Google India for over six years as sales head for multiple verticals including e-commerce, retail, classifieds, and education.

He's had over 20 years of experience in the digital, technology and consumer industry with stints at Dell, Motorola Mobility, Whirlpool and Godrej GE Appliances.

“Nitin brings with him an excellent mix of Digital, technical and consumer products sales experience. We are very excited to have him join our team and take our India story to the next level.” said Rick Harshman, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud

"With thousands of customers, a robust partner ecosystem backed by an India cloud region, we are excited by the momentum we have seen so far and will continue to invest in building a rich and diverse cloud ecosystem here." he added.

Google had launched its first cloud region in India in November last year to take on rivals Amazon, Microsoft and IBM who already have public cloud data centres in the country. This had enabled the search giant to tap into customers in regulated industries like financial institutions in the country.

In January, Google had also launched a new product called Cloud AutoML that helps businesses and developers with limited machine learning expertise easily build powerful custom machine learning models.

Among the first Cloud AutoML products being developed is Cloud AutoML Vision, a service that makes it easier to create custom machine learning models for image recognition.