Shailesh Rao

Archana Venkat

Chennai, Dec 16 He spends most of his time talking and interviewing people. Recently appointed Managing Director, Sales and Operations, Google India, Mr Shailesh Rao is enjoying what he does — marrying the Google culture with Indian process perspectives. Business Line caught up with him on the sidelines of L’Attitude 13 05’, a two-day management fest organised by the Great Lakes Institute of Management.

How has the structure of sales and their performance changed since you took over in March 2007? What innovation have you brought in?

Google is trying to grow aggressively in India as this is a strategic market for us. The focus of my work has been on hiring the best talent. I spend most of my time talking and interviewing people.

One of the intents of my coming here was to bring some sense of Google culture to India and marry it with the Indian way of delivering processes and performance. So I am basically doing a translation function by executing processes and sharing perspectives. I am also creating the right connection points between India and other Google centres.

I am very excited to spend a lot of time in India. I see tremendous opportunity in empowering Indians by giving them transparent access to information — whether it is information on healthcare, education or stock prices.

How has the search technology been received by customers in India? Our understanding is that only clients such as large media houses use your technology. Have you been able to attract small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to advertise on your platform?

We have been more than pleasantly surprised at the rate of adoption of our technology by businesses in India. The advertising platform is used by all companies — across size, business verticals or geographic regions.

The way we make money as a business is different. About 99 per cent of our revenues come from advertising. We think of ads as a funding source to create free products for consumers. When you do a search on Google, the ad you see side by side is what funds the search. This is an opportunity for Indian businesses. As the economy grows, consumers will need information to make choices and this is one platform they can benefit from.

Google has tied up with Bharti Airtel to try and monetise the conversation between two mobile users. How will this initiative pan out?

Increasingly people are looking at mobile communication, whether it is for music or digital information. We want to localise delivery of our products onto mobile devices. We want to tailor-make all our products for the handheld. Once this happens people will start using our services more often and this will be a new revenue model. But the concept is still very nascent. In a way even the Web-based search concept is still an experiment for Google.

What happened to your Froogle initiative that was launched in some markets in the US as an online shopping information guide? Do you have plans to start something on those lines in India?

It is difficult to comment on Froogle. We still want to provide people a list of all products and prices available in markets near them. I cannot share what initiatives we have ongoing in our labs. But we do have plans to localise content for India.

Whether it is enabling users to type in Hindi on Orkut or type out an email to a relative in any Indian language or making an application available on the mobile phone, we are focusing on tailoring products to suit the Indian market.

Do you have plans of entering the regional search market?

Having run the local search business for Google for two-and-a-half years I know how critical local search is to India. Most life experiences, like what we do or how we communicate, are within a very localised environment. We will be in that space.

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