Google At 15: How It Changed Lives Of SMEs In India

Let us wind the clocks back 15 years and look at the world we used to know. Personal computers powered with Windows 98 were talk of the town with a handful of users actually knowing how to use one. Enterprises used to keep piles of hard-cover files, ledgers and simply no one ever knew how to find anything anywhere anytime with just a few clicks. Then Google happened and now we are living in a totally different world of computing altogether. From basically a search engine, Google is now part of everyday life; in fact, it can be easily said that Google is now everyday life. But that’s not all; Google has even transformed the way we do business. With more than 58 percent of the Fortune 500 companies endorsing Google products, it has created a dependency like no other company has.

Google has shown exceptional confidence in the Indian enterprise sector, targeting especially the SMEs. In 2011, under its program called ‘India Get Your Business Online’ Google aimed to help more than 500,000 SMEs in India have an online presence by 2014. “For us, Google is the saviour. We can easily say that the price points we are getting Google products is unmatched and the kind of service we get is phenomenal,” says Bhupendra Khanal, CEO, Simplify360, a social business intelligence startup company.

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Analysts believe that coming from the consumer road, SMEs are the obvious target for Google in India and they are the ones most worried about cost implications. According to Benoy C.S, Director, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, Google is putting just the right strategy in targeting SMEs and the way things are going ahead it won’t take more than two to three years for Google to establish itself as a major vendor for large enterprises in India.

So, what is that which makes Google so lucrative for SMEs and even for large enterprises? For SMEs, one gets all the enterprise class products like Mail services, Calendar, File Management, etc at a price point which has demoralised most of the other big vendors. “It’s a steal deal for SMEs and even for most e-commerce players, as you get around 30 GB of storage, you can collaborate with IM and Hangout along with a seamless integration with Google Drive. All of this meant to raise average productivity,” says Katyayan Gupta, Analyst, Forrester Research. Issues like downtime are so rare that when Google went offline for 11 minutes a few days back, it became a global headline. Not only from the office productivity perspective, Google is also enabling thousands of enterprise with its Cloud services and that too in a manner in which there is absolutely no need for companies to have a dedicated team to manage the services.

One of the major advantages that SMEs gained out of Google is on the marketing frontier. Google brought down the earlier means of capital intensive marketing into the pockets of several SMEs. Milind Borate, Co-founder and CTO, Druva, a data protection and governance solutions company, says, “Google has changed the way we use to market our products. It has opened the door for many startups who could not afford pricy marketing initiatives.”
And, that’s not all, with the all new AdGlobal360, a full-service Google Premier SME Partner specialising in developing digital marketing programs, Google is all set to cash on the rising demand for online marketing tools and services.

The way Google is evolving day-by-day and the kind of automation it bringing in day to day services; it is very plausible that even large enterprise in India will start considering Google in a big way. With mobility clearly dominating the future of computing, Google will help many more enterprises take advantage of the freedom they enjoy as consumers and using the web to work together, from anywhere, anytime.