Google ropes in the India research head at Microsoft Azure's cloud division

• Google today announced the appointment of Anil Bhansali as the VP of Engineering for Google Cloud in India.
• Bhansali comes in at Google after a 28-year stint at Microsoft, where he was last the Corporate Vice President of their Azure cloud division.
• Google has been expanding its cloud offering in India. In March 2020, Google announced that it was adding a second region to its Google Cloud Platform in India.

Google today announced the appointment of Anil Bhansali as the Vice President of Engineering for Google Cloud in India. Bhansali comes in at Google after a 28-year stint at Microsoft, where he was last the Corporate Vice President of their Azure cloud division.

Bhansali was also the India site head for the research and development of Azure. He also led the engineering efforts of Microsoft’s Office, Search, and Windows divisions.

“Product innovation that enables digital transformation sits right at the core of Google Cloud’s mission. We’re very excited that Anil Bhansali has joined Google Cloud to help grow and scale our software development support efforts in India so we can continue expanding and advancing Google Cloud services that are used by customers in more than 150 countries worldwide,” Amit Zavery, Vice President, Engineering, Google LLC said on the appointment.

Google has been expanding its cloud offering in India. In March 2020, Google announced that it was adding a second region to its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in India. After Mumbai, it opened a Delhi cloud region.

“GCP regions are the cornerstone of our cloud infrastructure, and they enable customers such as L&T Finance, Manipal Hospital Group, Reliance Mutual Fund, Royal Enfield, TechMahindra, Truecaller, and many more to deliver high performing, secure, low latency, cloud-based services to their users, no matter where they are around the world,” the company had said in a statement.

Google competes with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services in the cloud business. However, in India, Google’s cloud business falls behind its two competitors.

Ashutosh Sharma, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester, told IANS in July 2019 that AWS had the first-mover advantage, while Microsoft has the advantage of having more clients globally as well.

"This is one of the key reasons why they hired Thomas Kurien (an Oracle veteran) to run their enterprise business. Google also suffers from a brand disadvantage when it comes to it being an enterprise IT vendor. They are considered providers of very niche services unlike AWS and Microsoft," Sharma told IANS.


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