Jio, Google Join Hands in Cloud Partnership in Boost to 5G Plans
Alphabet’s Google is forging a cloud partnership with Reliance Jio, helping the country’s biggest wireless carrier with tech solutions for its enterprise and consumer offerings as it plans to launch 5G services.
The tie-up lends Jio the expertise of a global tech giant as it expands digital services to small and medium businesses as well as hundreds of millions of individual customers. And it gives Google the unmatched scale of Reliance whose new-age businesses range from telecoms to e-commerce.
Jio is part of tycoon billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s oil-to-retail conglomerate Reliance Industries.
“It’s a broad partnership, it involves multiple pieces of Alphabet working together,” Thomas Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at Google Cloud, told Reuters in an interview ahead of Reliance’s annual shareholders meeting on Thursday.
“Our own partnership spans multiple parts of Jio not just the communications business… but also health, retail and other things. And it allows us to bring our technology to many consumers in India in a broad-scale basis as well as to many businesses that are served by Reliance.”
While Google is working with other telecoms firms on 5G around the world, the scale of the Jio-Google cloud partnership is among the biggest for the California-headquartered company globally, said Kurian.
