Cloud computing is thriving in India despite the apprehensions expressed by various stakeholders. Google is betting on the growing cloud computing market in India with plans to double its engineering headcount (it currently has 300 engineers) in the country in the next two years, Google India’s head of engineering Peeyush Ranjan said last week. “We are optimistic about the growth of cloud activities in the country and we would be hiring hundreds more to serve our clientele who are seeing a fundamental shift towards cloud for new businesses,” he said.

Plans are afoot to make its Hyderabad facility a center of excellence for cloud computing activities. “We target the SMB market in India for cloud. The country, like China, is a very price-sensitive market and the small and medium businesses are showing interest in adopting the cloud model primarily due to the cost advantages at various points of its implementation,” Ranjan said. Google has about 3 million clients worldwide on cloud and in India, the number of clients stand at 100,000. Most of these are educational institutions, corporates and SMBs.

Google Apps, the company’s offering for the enterprises to move into the cloud, has about 25 million active users currently. “We are signing about 3,000 businesses every day and we are approaching the market through about 1,000 authorized resellers,” he said.

Microsoft, too, has seen increased interest in India for its cloud platform. “We are seeing a healthy and ever-increasing momentum around cloud adoption by India businesses. Over 4,000 applications have been built for Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, from India alone,” Microsoft India Director (server business) Pallavi Kathuria has said.

• Tweet