Google says Anthos resonating well with Indian clients

BENGALURU: Google Cloud VP and head of platform Amit Zavery says the company’s hybrid cloud is resonating well with its Indian customers. The solution, powered by open-source technologies, offers interoperability between all kinds of clouds .
“Many are looking at hybrid because of data residency, and privacy regulation in some industries. And we are coming out very strongly with our offerings around Anthos where you can use your application from anywhere and without having to rewrite it every time. Anthos gives you the ability to run the app on Google cloud, or you can use it on-premise or in a hybrid environment – especially for customers who are worried about investing in one single cloud. We are seeing more proofs-of-concepts, specific deployments in some verticals, and lift-and-shift processes,” Zavery says.
Zavery was at Oracle as executive vice-president and general manager of its cloud platform and middleware products, a segment that generated over $6 billion of revenue annually. He followed his former boss at Oracle and now Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, after the latter took charge of the business some 16 months ago.
Cloud infrastructure and services are today dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Zavery is hoping Anthos would be able to challenge the leaders.
Google Cloud is on a $10.5 billion annual revenue run rate, up 53% year-on-year. In the latest investor call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that American e-commerce player Wayfair and Lowe’s had leveraged its cloud to transform their operations.
Retail, Zavery says, is a big focus for Google. Financial services, technology, media and entertainment, public sector, healthcare are other industries it is focusing on. “For retailers, we build merchandising capabilities, optimise their supply chains, build omni-channel presence, add capabilities in conversational AI,” he says, adding that Google’s $2.6-billion acquisition of Looker will accelerate the cloud strategy. Looker’s a platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics.
Google intends to triple its go-to-market team for the cloud business. “We don’t share the number. The scale is big. It includes direct sales, large partner ecosystem with regional system integrators, tech partners, re-sellers and value-added distributors and we have been doing a lot of work with them,” he says.
In India, it has partnered with Airtel, which will offer G Suite to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as part of an integrated ICT portfolio. G Suite is a set of intelligent apps – Gmail, docs, drive, calendar and more – designed with real-time collaboration and machine intelligence capabilities to bring people together and help them work smarter and safer. Zavery says India is an important part of its talent pool, given the volume of work done here.