The Microsoft-owned, popular open source code repository Github, has announced opening of a new India subsidiary today. The new company, called Github India Private Limited, will focus on primarily expanding Github’s enterprise efforts in the country, along with signing up more developers from India on its platform.
India is already a big market for Github. The country is third on the list of largest markets for Github, and hence the focus. According to a blog post penned by Github’s Erica Brescia, the company plans to aggressively scale and build functions within its India subsidiary soon. She said, “Over the next few months, we’re building a team across all functions—including community, engineering, sales, support, marketing, and services—to enable our customers to adopt DevOps best practices at scale and collaborate with over 40 million developers across more than 100 million projects.”
To lead Github’s India ops, the company has hired Maneesh Sharma as the general manager for India.
While enterprise will clearly be a strong focus, the company aims to provide a more comprehensive support to the local developer community as well. Over the past year, the number of public Github repositories in India has grown 75 percent, demonstrating a sharp increase in collaboration across the Indian developer community. Seeing that upsurge, the company aims to dive deeper into dev community initiatives. “In building out a local team in India, our goal is to create stronger relationships with developers and support open source development across developers, maintainers, and enterprises”, adds Brescia.
The expansion quite a lot of sense for Github, in more than one ways. For one, India is known to be, for quite some time now, the student developers capital of the world. Indian education’s rigorous focus on STEM has resulted in the country creating one of the largest pools of young student developers. Github aims to target that student base as well. The company announced the extension of its GitHub Hackathon Grant program to students in India, which supports student hackathons with up to $1,000 in grants.
Github says, that it has seen a 22% year on year rise in the number of developers from India, signing up on its platform, giving the company all the more reason to open an India-focused subsidiary.
The company was recently in news, when it teamed up with Mozilla and cloudflare to appeal Indian government for maintaining transparency in its content policy rules. In a letter written to the Indian government, GitHub, Mozilla, and CloudFlare urged to see the final draft of intermediary rules that will define how online platforms have to regulate content before it’s presented in front of the Supreme Court on January 15.
