$167 billion worth Google (restructured as Alphabet), which is hailed as World’s most powerful Internet company, had churned out revenues worth $900 million in India, last year.
These earnings from India came mainly via advertisements through their Adwords program.
But it seems that this is not enough for Google.
In a major push towards diversification, Google has announced that they will jump into the lucrative IT Consulting niche in India.
Can Indian IT companies compete against Google’s onslaught?
Google Will Offer IT Consultancy
As per preliminary reports coming in, Google is now all set to roll out big ticket IT consultancy to large business conglomerates.
To start with, Google will offer their expertise and consultancy in the fields of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, helping large companies to use these technologies for their own business.
Mohit Pande, Country Head – India, Google Cloud said, “We have invested significantly into professional services in India. These are consulting services, change management services for the customers where we work with them to solve some of their most complex problems,”
It seems that the consultancy offered by Google will focus on the Cloud aspect, as they have already invested $30 billion on various cloud services, globally; and now, it is the time to generate revenues.
Google sees themselves as a major competitor of Amazon Web Services, IBM Softlayer and Microsoft Azure in India, and globally, and their IT Consultancy will use this base to build their customer base.
Will Google Compete Against TCS, Infosys?
Right now, IT Consultants like TCS, Infosys and others deploy Google services on the IT platforms of big clients, and thereby generate revenues for themselves.
But now, along with IT services companies like TCS & Infosys, Google will also directly work with the clients to deploy their own services, besides providing high-end consultancy for other technologies.
In this regards, Pande said, “TCS and Infosys can continue to deliver (Google services) but many customers want to engage with us directly because there are skills that we bring in and areas that we are able to pool in with our engineers.”, adding, “We work with our partners for scale. But professional services are Google-led where it engages with the customer directly.”
This is certainly one big diversification in Google’s traditional business model, wherein they developed products and allowed IT Consultants to use that product to make money for everyone.
It seems that now Google wants to own and milk the whole chain, from top to bottom. In the coming days, Google will now themselves deploy G-Suite applications for large clients.
Google May Open Advanced Solutions Lab in India
In continuation of their diversification drive, Google is also planning to launch Advanced Solutions Lab in multiple countries. Right now, this high profile lab only exists in Mountain View, California.
Confirming this plan, Pande said, “Right now we have Advanced Solutions Lab only in Mountain View, California. But we soon intend to open it in multiple parts of the world as well. At Advanced Solutions Lab, we take customers who come with their core problems and in this lab, we bring in our engineering and product teams and together help customers. We build solutions along with the customer to solve the problems,”
Besides, a new data centre will be also opened in Mumbai, which will support their Cloud initiatives in India and Asia Pacific.
Can Google unleash disruption in the IT Consulting sector in India? How will the existing companies match Google’s expertise and experience? Do let us know your opinions, by commenting right here!
[Updated] Story/Title updated to showcase facts (based on inputs from Google representatives)