GitHub eyes Indian market, forms local subsidiary

Software development platform GitHub has opened a new subsidiary in India, marking its foray into a market with a growing developer community.

Over the next few months, the company will build a country team across all functions, including engineering, sales and marketing, to help enterprises adopt DevOps best practices at scale, and to collaborate with some 40 million developers on over 100 million projects.

India has the third-highest number of active developers on GitHub, growing by 22% over the past year. The number of public repositories in India has also grown by 75%.

GitHub India will be headed by its general manager Maneesh Sharma, who will lead the company’s growth strategy in the subcontinent. For a start, GitHub is bringing the GitHub hackathon grant programme, which supports student hackathons with up to $1,000 in grants, to India.

On the enterprise front, GitHub said it will expand its channel partner programme to support GitHub enterprise customers in their software development operations, enabling them to achieve their digital transformation goals.

Take Swiggy, India’s largest food delivery platform. The company is using GitHub to run its software development operations, resulting in increased productivity and faster innovation, according to Manjunath Chandrashekar, its director of engineering.

“We believe that happy developers build better products, which results in higher customer satisfaction – a win-win for all,” Chandrashekar said.

According to IDC, the DevOps software market in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, is expected to reach $754.7m by 2022 as more enterprises engage in software-driven innovation.

“Businesses, even those in traditional sectors, such as manufacturing, mining, and agriculture, are beginning to recognise that technology plays a critical role in reaching new frontiers and customer segments,” said Chris Zhang, research manager at IDC Asia-Pacific.

She added: “The rapid development and deployment of applications are becoming necessities and can only be delivered by a high-performance and collaborative IT function.”