For the last one year, Bikram Singh Bedi has been sharpening his skills to play the guitar as he was able to get enough time to spend on learning new abilities during the pandemic. He plays tunes of Bollywood songs from the 1980s and 1990s. Besides that, Bedi, a senior tech industry veteran with over 26 years of leadership experience, is focusing on the biggest assignment he bagged recently. Bedi succeeded Karan Bajwa as tech giant Google Cloud’s new managing director for India. He is responsible for leading Google Cloud's sales and operations teams in the country.
Bedi joined Google Cloud from SoftBank-backed online grocery startup Grofers where he served as president for strategy and new initiatives. Before that, he set up the Amazon Web Services (AWS) business in India and was the head of India and South Asia for 6 years. He also held various leadership positions at tech firms IBM and Oracle. “As Google (opportunity) came along my first response was ignore it, maybe I have done this before in life, ” says Bedi. “But I then realised the (work) Google was talking about was very different and hence there would be big learnings.”
Indeed, a few years ago cloud computing used to be more about ease of using servers and storage and running data centres more efficiently. But the Covid-19 pandemic has also accelerated the adoption of tech by enterprises. Now cloud computing is about helping customers to accelerate their journey of becoming a digital company. This includes providing platforms, infrastructure and industry solutions. And Google is doubling down on that strategy.
“For most customers, the buck has moved,” says Bedi. “Most customers are asking how can you help us become a digital company.”
To achieve that Google is ramping up its capabilities and competing with global rivals, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to dominate cloud computing services. Under Bedi's leadership, Google is eyeing to make deeper inroads in areas such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, healthcare, public sector, media and entertainment and telecom and retail in India. Google Cloud currently operates 24 regions and 73 zones in 17 countries. With one cloud region already in Mumbai, Google has plans to open a second cloud region in Delhi this year. It is also making investments to hire talent related to technology, sales and customer service. The firm is also making investments in cloud learning services to enhance the skills of students and professionals.