Internet giant Google has quietly started rolling out its professional consulting services in India wherein it will work directly with large clients to offer IT-based consulting solutions.

“We have invested significantly into professional services in India. These are consulting services, change management services for the customers where we work with them to solve some of their most complex problems,” Mohit Pande, Country Head - India, Google Cloud, told BusinessLine.

With the professional services arm, Google will work with large clients directly to train their staff in technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence and help build applications on top of Google’s machine learning platforms.

Google sees India as a significant market for its cloud services, where it competes with Amazon Web Services, IBM Softlayer and Microsoft Azure. Google is so far the only big cloud provider which does not have a data centre in India, but plans to open one in Mumbai before this year-end.

“India assumes a lot of significance for us. It is a large market where public cloud is set for huge amount of growth. I also think because of the environment in India where internet services are getting better, data are getting cheaper,” Pande said.

Google has invested over $30 billion on its cloud platform in the last three years globally. This includes investments in setting up cloud data centres across the globe, one of which is set to come up in India.

Given the growing importance of India, Google may also set up an Advanced Solutions Lab in India, which so far is only in Mountain View, California, Pande indicated. The lab will be an extension to Google’s Professional services in the country.

“Right now we have Advanced Solutions Lab only in Mountain View, California. But we soon intend to open it in multiple parts of the world as well. At Advanced Solutions Lab, we take customers who come with their core problems and in this lab we bring in our engineering and product teams and together help customers. We build solutions along with the customer to solve the problems,” Pande said.

Google, however, will continue to work with its partners such as TCS and Infosys to deploy its offerings. “We work with our partners for scale. But professional services are Google-led where it engages with the customer directly,” Pande said, adding that Google will not compete with Indian IT services players in any way.

“TCS and Infosys can continue to deliver (Google services) but many customers want to engage with us directly because there are skills that we bring in and areas that we are able to pool in with our engineers,” Pande added.

Google has a significant presence in India with its G-Suite services, which include Gmail, messaging and Google drive offerings for enterprises.

Google is now investing heavily in India for its cloud offerings, in particular its public cloud offering termed Google Cloud Platform wherein companies can rent compute and storage capacity from Google.

For this, the company is planning to double its headcount for the cloud business in India wherein it is hiring people in sales and marketing roles as well as engineers for professional consulting services.