It’s now been five months since Google announced that it would open an office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – the first one after it started operations in Singapore about four years ago. Since then, the team, led by Malaysia’s Country Head Sajith Sivanandan, has been kept busy sourcing out local talent to hire, strategising, and setting up base in the Petronas Twin Towers in KLCC – a space that Sajith admits, is nothing like the GooglePlex.
“There’s just a few tables there, and I keep telling people it’s nothing like Google’s headquarters. But it’s not as bad as having wires strung out all over the place” Sajith says.
If it all sounds a little chaotic, it probably is. “I’d like to think our work here is something like an iceberg – people only see a third of the work being done, but two-thirds of the work here lies beneath the surface,” he says.
Recently Google made a couple of major steps in localising themselves in Malaysia, notably launching Google Checkout and Google Voice Search in Malaysia over the past few weeks. And more will come, Sajith adds.
We caught up with the country head to find out more about Google’s efforts here, and what they plan to do in aiding the local business and developer communities.
So keep us up to speed about what’s been going on with Google’s office in Malaysia.
In the last few months it’s been about finding the right kind of people to hire, and we’re lucky to have found three Malaysians who have just started two to three weeks ago, and we plan to hire another five more people across sales, marketing and PR, bringing the total to about eight to ten people in the office.
But that’s just the surface of things. There’s much more happening below the water – at Google, we’d still like to think that we’re a small company, but really we’ve grown quite a bit. So there’s a lot of internal dialogues and discussions across Google’s offices around the world taking place about how we can localise more of our products in Malaysia. Voice Search is just the start of it. We’re really keen to start work on Street View, which we would get on once the necessary clearances are obtained.
How is Malaysia’s role different than the office in Singapore?
For the longest time, people from Singapore’s office would travel to and from Malaysia, so it just made sense to have people based here so that we can be closer to the partners, and engage better with the ecosystem.
So the main differences – or you could call them similarities – is that our charter here is to (a) help develop the online ecosystem, (b) make it incredibly easy for Malaysians to find things online, and (c) help the SMEs get into the digital space.
The country has a huge SME business community, making up about 99% of all businesses here. Of those 600,000 SMEs here, about 100,000 of them have websites, so not only do we want help those who have websites to do more, but we want to help those who don’t have websites to come online.
So yes, our role here is more than just setting up a sales and marketing post. We want to grow in a way that benefits the country; we want to work with more partners in which we can help train SMEs, develop their businesses, educate them on how they could get more targeted customers.
How educated is the SME community here in utilising Google for their businesses?
While there is a small segment of SMEs who get it, there’s a larger group out there who are eager to get online, but are prevented from doing so because of a lack of education about using online tools, for example. It’s not scalable for Google to educate everybody, so what we want to do is to get more partners and training companies to be part of this ecosystem.
Do you plan on fostering better ties and help grow the developer community here?
There are plans, but I can’t talk about them specifically. What I’m trying to do is engage with more of them. Recently, one of KL’s Google Technology User Group (GTUG) members attended the recent Google I/O conference as a guest of ours. Not only that, but we also did live streamcast events of Google I/O to about 40 to 50 cities around the world, including KL, which had among the highest participation numbers from developers – even though it was very late at night here. These are just a few ways in which we want to get more engaged with that community. Look out for more in this space, and I don’t mean events only – that’s only a part of it.
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