In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

With the novel coronavirus COVID-19 sweeping across continents and fatalities climbing every day, it was only a matter of time before countries closed their borders to contain its spread.

In the wake of this decision, travel and tourism, the linchpins of many economies, were among the worst affected.

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 22 percent fall in international tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2020, and could see an annual decline of between 60 percent and 80 percent when compared with 2019.

The impact on the economy and to livelihoods that are dependent on tourism and hospitality has been significant. Prior to the pandemic, the outlook was quite different. Research by UNWTO in 2018 estimated that India would have 50 million outbound tourists by 2020.

Technology was also set to play a huge part in that growth. A Google Travel study showed that 74 percent of travellers were planning their trips on the Internet, and technologies like AI, IoT and VR were all set to be key trends this year.

Now, as borders slowly reopen and travel restrictions are gradually lifted, technology could once again be the game-changer. Manoj Sharma CTO, Cleartrip.com spoke to YourStory about the industry’s road to recovery and how technology will aid that journey.

Read the Full Story on YourStory

Business leaders see much in Artificial Intelligence, including new ways to save money, serve customers, and figure out what to build. What’s often tougher is deciding how to engage. That’s understandable, since getting into AI often raises questions about costs, data integrity, project length, and similar issues of planning and execution.

For CIOs concerned with the deployment and use of IT at their companies, these are critical issues. Here is one way to think about this complexity, by breaking it down into three different areas; Early Automation, Learning and working, and System Views.

First, a bit of good news and myth dispelling for readers who think AI is some far off promise, still in the labs and not safe for work. The reality is that AI is very much here, and almost everyone in your workplace is using it every day. People work with AI when they use Google Search, Photos, the autocomplete feature in Docs, live translation in Pixel phones, and many other areas. It is in the products of many other companies too.

“IDC reports that the market for AI software, hardware and services is expected to break the $500 billion mark in 2023.”

Additionally, it’s increasingly clear that AI can be adapted as a virtuous process, not just a one-off purchase (though there is much to recommend that.) During a recent Alphabet earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that “investments in AI will be key” to its near-term strategy, with new techniques that make it faster and easier to train and build AI for a number of uses. Additionally, the company is offering AI-driven “insights, new tools, and automation” to its advertising clients. The striking thing in this was the way that developing AI in one area could lead to growth in many others.

So, how does an IT leader foster a growth process like this for their stakeholders? By leading people through the well-established stages of Awareness, Learning, and Extension. Here’s what I mean.

Awareness: Early Automation

Consumer-facing AI is particularly strong in communications functions like voice recognition, translation, and writing tips. It’s similar in business uses: One of the most effective early instances of AI in the workplace has been Contact Center AI (CCAI), which manages basic customer communications, automatically answering common questions and prioritizing calls that require human assistance. It is doing what automation has always done best, automating the rote stuff and leaving the higher-value imaginative activity to people. It has been used by governments, retailers, telecommunications companies, and others, in a wide variety of use cases.

These and similar language-centric products, like DocAI for extracting information from things like invoices, receipts, or AI that extracts information from business contracts, have a number of benefits. For one, the investment is relatively easy to control, unlike with a research project leading to a formal launch. The payoff is also clearer. In the case of contact centers, in particular, the automation relieves stress, wins loyalty and slows disaffection in a high-turnover area. In both cases, successful results build allies in the business, who can testify to the earlier benefits when it’s time to take on something more complex.

Perhaps best of all, creating interest in basic AI services for business, right now, means people become engaged in learning more, since they see the early benefits and wonder what else might be done.

Learning: The Human Factor

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) that goes into these ready made, “out of the box” AI products can, not surprisingly, be used on much more sophisticated levels. Twitter, for example, processes 400 billion different events in real time, and its staff queries this trove using advanced NLP, answering questions and improving customer experiences.

There is clearly an enormous gap between Call Center AI and processing Twitter’s 400 billion events per day, but it’s not noticed enough how quickly that gap is closing. Look at how many products, partners, and training resources have emerged in the past few years. The gap makes sense, insofar as both the means of AI (like large data sets, good algorithms, and sufficient computing) and the value of AI, are new.

Increasingly, as AI is incorporated into standard enterprise tools like spreadsheets and analytic tools, easier to use AI becomes a skill within reach for many (even as the advanced end becomes more complex, meaning this ease of use process will continue for some time.)

It’s so new that AI skills demand isn’t met by conventional education means, creating lots of good opportunities for both nonstandard skills training, and in-house learning in the workforce. Companies offering AI skills training could well gain a competitive advantage and retain staff better.

Extension: Building System Views

When a new technology lands and gains in popularity, people seek to find new uses for it, or build connections among its different uses. Networked computing is one example, but think also of the way cars were soon followed by trucks and fire engines, or the way the data services on wireless phones soon morphed into the App Economy. If something is useful, people look for ways to grow it.

How will AI grow? My colleague Dominik Wee recently wrote about ways that AI will soon change supply chains, change product design, and improve sustainability. Most interestingly, he talked about how customers in manufacturing were realizing savings and gaining insights when once separate quality control data was combined with system wide views of the quality process.

There are several reasons to think AI will promote many such system views. For one thing, successful AI promotes the collection of data from more places, at greater frequency, since that leads to insight (and the cost of data collection is dropping.) Additionally, AI is good at spotting patterns and interactions that are not currently known. As well, AI is used in prediction and scenario planning, which leads to better understanding of how large-scale systems interact.

This comes at a time when we have more ways of seeing the world, from satellites, sensors, social media, and much more. We have more awareness of interactions, and a demand to understand them, in everything from the supply chain crisis, to human rights and sourcing regulations, or in the business realities of partnering, and serving customers in all sorts of ways, online and in the physical world.

Whether by coincidence or design, the Age of AI is also an age when organizations see themselves more accurately with a rich web of connections, with their choices and actions having more resonance than ever. That awareness is both a competitive tool, and a call to greater responsibility, potentially affording more customer loyalty and a more satisfied workforce for those who get it right.

That transformation won’t happen everywhere overnight, but it seems to be happening at all sorts of companies. And the trend for AI to assist, to be studied and grown, and to provide a richer understanding of the world, is happening every time someone touches this technology, at whatever level they need.

For more than 15 years, developers have used Google Maps Platform to deliver location-based experiences to their end users and used location intelligence to optimize their businesses. Along this journey, we’ve made a variety of changes to better support our community as needs have changed and new industries and technologies have emerged. We started rolling out a new website experience, at https://mapsplatform.google.com, to help you better understand the products and solutions best suited to address your objectives. Plus, now you can directly connect to the developer documentation for each product to get started quickly, and you can visualize usage and associated costs to have a better idea of what to expect before getting started. 

Getting to your solution faster 

Maps, Routes, Places are building blocks that let you develop implementations for any use case. Building for specific use cases, however, typically requires using a combination of APIs and SDKs. To help you quickly understand what’s possible and what you need to build for your use case, you can now visit the solutions tab to select from a list of popular use cases or industries. Once you’ve selected a use case or industry, you’re taken to a page where you can explore relevant products, read helpful blog posts, see how other customers have deployed for similar use cases, and more.  

Direct access to developer documentation

Did you know there are more than a thousand pages of developer documentation created to help you get started, unblock you when you’re stuck, and share best practices? Now when you explore a product or solution from the Google Maps Platform website, you can easily navigate back and forth between our website and documentation. Just tap on JS, iOS, Android or API under the product name to get to the documentation you need. 

Budgeting for your project

To help you calculate pricing for your project, we’ve introduced a new pricing calculator. Once you find the product and API or SDK you plan to use, pull the slider to reflect your estimated number of monthly requests. This will automatically update the “monthly cost” column for each product and API or SDK you plan to use. If your estimated monthly requests exceed the slider limit, contact our sales team to ​​learn about volume discounts that start at 20% off. 

We hope our new website makes it easier to discover our products and solutions, estimate your budget, and start building with our documentation so you can deliver helpful experiences to your users and optimize your business. 

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit https://mapsplatform.google.com.