Google says enterprise biz, new products are driving growth in India

Google has been pushing its several products from hangouts to Google now in India in a big way and increase localisation as it looks to be the first to tap those who are not covered by the internet. Sandeep Menon, country head marketing, Google India tells Beryl Menezes how innovation – and not competition – is driving the rapid product changes, with the new hangouts and YouTube being extremely popular in India. Excerpts from the interview:

What was the idea behind the recent changes to gmail, Google+, as well as your new introductions into the Indian market like Google hangouts, Google Now?
Innovation is something that is a constant driving force at Google. Hangouts – with group live chat option – was very successful in Google+, and hence we decided to integrate it with gmail. Google now was introduced because we saw a need to refine the Google search, and offer more assistance.

What has been the feedback from users to these new product innovations?
The global feedback has been very positive, though in India it is still early days to comment. However, Google hangouts has become more popular in India than in other countries – being used equally from celebrities to the youth. YouTube also remains one of the most popular products in India, given Indians’ love for videos and the live recording option for group chat.

How do you deal with competition from mushrooming service providers like Whatsapp, Viber, Wechat?
While we believe constant and consistent innovation is the only way to stay ahead, we do encourage users to try other platforms as well.

How popular is your cloud offering, especially among enterprise customers? Do you have any specialised offerings for them?
We have been witnessing a lot of traction for our cloud offerings in India recently. For our enterprise customers who avail of a Google enterprise licence, we offer 100 GB space on gmail, Google Earth and Google Docs – which is 10 times the storage space offered for consumers. We also offer them dedicated support lines 24/7 and recently have halved our prices to Rs 150 per month  to encourage usage among SMBs.

Google also set up Get India Business Online a year-and-a-half ago for entrepreneurs. How is that doing?
Get India Business Online was an initiative by Google to aid SMBs to set up their websites for free with Google’s support. Google offers this service for free for a year. We have over 200,000 enterprise customers already for this initiative.

Does India’s low internet penetration have any impact on new product innovation by Google?
No, in fact we view the low penetration as a huge opportunity. We believe the solutions for the lack of internet penetration are mainly better access, content and internet ecosystem.

While better access is best left to the government, at Google, we provide all our products in several Indian languages to aid in more relevant content and reach. Towards building a better ecosystem, we recently pledged with Nasscom to set up 10,000 startups in the next ten years in India. In the US, 10,000 startups are up and running every year.