Google LLC has an ecosystem of partner firms that make it easier for enterprises to adopt its cloud platform by providing professional services such as application migration and security monitoring. Today, the company announced a broad alliance with outsourcing giant HCL Technologies Ltd. that will strengthen this element of its go-to-market strategy.

India-based HCL is one of the world’s largest technology consulting firms, with more than $8.6 billion in annual revenue. The company currently has about 1,300 cloud specialists trained on Google Cloud. With the help of the search giant, HCL plans to grow that workforce to more than 5,000 employees in the “near future” and bring them under the wing of a new Google Cloud Business Unit.

The division will operate with support from Google engineering and business teams, the outsourcing provider said. HCL’s 5,000-plus cloud specialists will provide services ranging from application migration to assistance with adopting Google’s hosted machine learning products. Another offering the consultancy will prioritize is Anthos, a family of hybrid cloud tools that the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary debuted earlier this year.

HCL plans to open three customer hubs in the U.S., India and the U.K. to support the division’s work. The labs will provide “business-focused design workshops” to give enterprises technical guidance on how they can start using Google Cloud and launch their pilot projects faster. 

“Through our partnership with HCL, we can help organizations deploy Google Cloud broadly and at scale, and move their most critical, data-intensive workloads to GCP,” Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian said in a statement. HCL will primarily target organizations in major vertical markets such as manufacturing and financial services. 

The announcement of the HCL collaboration comes six months after Google deepened its partnership with Accenture plc. The consultancy is working with the search giant to develop new solutions based on its machine learning and  data management services. 

Photo: Google