Karan Bajwa’s journey from Ludhiana to Cisco, Microsoft, IBM to now, Google Cloud head in Asia

• Google just appointed Karan Bajwa as its Asia cloud business head.
• Bajwa has earlier worked at Cisco, Microsoft and most recently the Managing Director for India and South Asia for IBM.
• He will be responsible for all the revenue growth as well as the go-to market operations for Google Cloud.

Google appointed Karan Bajwa as the head of its Asia cloud business, after appointing him as the India cloud business head in March, 2020. With over three decades of leadership experience, Bajwa has a strong legacy of working at Cisco, Microsoft and most recently was the managing director for India and South Asia at IBM.

“Since Karan joined us in March 2020, Google Cloud in India has grown from strength to strength. He’s advanced the digital transformation journeys of many large Indian organizations across industries and successfully expanded our partner community. He brings tremendous management and sales experience with him to this regional role, and we’re thrilled to have him at the helm of our APAC business,” said Rob Enslin, President of Sales, Google Cloud.

At Google Cloud, Bajwa will be responsible for all the revenue growth as well as the go-to market operations for Google Cloud's extensive solution portfolio that includes Google Cloud Platform and G Suite.

“With the disruptions of 2020 behind us, a true test of 2021 will be how companies replatform and build on the cloud not only for resilience but agility and innovation, and I’m excited for the opportunity to lead Google Cloud’s business in APAC to maximize this next phase of growth,” said Bajwa.

Ludhiana’s pride

Bajwa is a graduate from Guru Nanak Engineering College in Ludhiana. He did his schooling too from the industrial city of Punjab. And over the years, he went on to become Ludhiana’s pride.

Bajwa’s stint with leadership roles began at Cisco, where he worked as a vice president of the company. After a one-and-a-half year stint with Cisco, Bajwa moved on to Microsoft. At Microsoft, he went from being the general manager-public sector in 2007 to heading Microsoft India from 2013 to 2016.

In 2016, Bajwa went on to lead IBM India and held on to that position for four years before announcing his departure in January 2020.

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Leading cloud businesses

At IBM, Bajwa was called the ‘transformation man’. A workaholic, Bajwa used to shuttle between the company’s headquarters in Bengaluru as well as his homeground - Gurgaon.

Bajwa led the IBM Support Assistant (ISA) business when there was a visible growing change in the marketplace and was also responsible for scaling up IBM’s mid-market business.

Bajwa also led IBM’s cloud business, leading the transition at a time when India was new to adapting cloud businesses.

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