India is all set to become a battleground as Google is gearing up to take on Microsoft and IBM as the California-headquartered search giant is eyeing a piece of the lucrative enterprise business.
Google has been looking at getting corporates to use Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Hangouts and its cloud platform. And the push on Google-Apps-For-Work, rebranded as G-Suite last week, has been particularly strong in India.
For starters, top executives from G-Suite have been visiting India every third month to meet potential corporate customers. To lure enterprise customers locked into contracts with competitors like Microsoft and IBM, Google is sweetening the deal by offering free service till the existing contract ends. Google had sounded its intent to go after the enterprise business in India when it cut prices nearly in half to drive adoption in 2013.
"We do see that overall in India, Google is doing pretty well, actually better than in other areas. If you look at the worldwide market, it is competitive though Microsoft is doing better. It is a viable competitor in most markets but definitely in India," Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at technology research firm Gartner, told ET.
Mann said Google had become more focused on the enterprise business since it brought in former VMware founder Diane Greene to run its cloud business last November. Even in India, experts say the company is hiring from enterprise technology vendors and is building a base of partners.
In August, Rick Harshman, managing director of Asia Pacific and Japan for Google's cloud platform, said the company was hiring 'pretty aggressively' in the India market.
"India is one of our fastest growing markets. I can't give you number, but yes, we are growing our sales force here," Mohit Pande, country manager, India and South East Asia, for Google for Work, told ET recently.
"The company is hiring sales executives both at the mid-level and at the senior level. They are just building up the team. Now that the have announced in-country data centres, they have a better offering to take to corporates," an industry analyst with knowledge of the hiring plans for the enterprise business told ET.
But even with the arrival of data centres in the country in 2017 and an enterprise sales team, corporate chief information officers say Google will have to do a lot more to win their business.
"I know some companies that are exploring that. But I would not be very comfortable because you need a different DNA to serve corporates, you need customer support and integration teams. Simply a data centre here is not enough," a chief information officer with a financial services company said. Google counts Hero Motors, Welspun JSW Steel and Flipkart as large enterprise customers.
The corporate DNA is something established players like Microsoft and IBM are highlighting in their pitch to customers. "We have financial-backed service level agreements.
If you are not able to send an email, we know that is a problem for your business. We give customers that comfort along with innovation and flexibility," Alok Lall, director of Microsoft India'Office division, said. Lall added that Office 365 had been growing in the 'healthy double digit range' for the past few years and had even been attracting customers who used other platforms.
And as Google enters its hunting ground of large enterprises, IBM is making a play for small-and-medium businesses. "When we had onpremise offerings, it was hard for a small company because there was a cost issue. Now we have a cloud offering and size isn't a barrier. We have started building up a partner ecosystem to target SMBs," Shailesh Agrawal, director — strategy & operations — at IBM India said.
Analysts say the competitive landscape will likely shift next year, as they expect Apple to enter the fray. "With Apple and IBM both investing aggressively in productivity and storage (take Apple iCloud and IBM Verse), 2017 will see competition in this space intensify between Google, Microsoft, Apple and IBM," Anshoo Nandwani, Principal Analyst at Greyhound Research, said.
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