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Telecommunications Australia gets its own Googleplex
Telecommunications Australia gets its own Googleplex | Australia gets its own Googleplex |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 16 May 2006 | |
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"To scale with the overall growth of Google's business, we are actively hiring and offering additional services to better support our users, partners and advertisers in Australia," said Kate Vale, head of sales and operations for Google Australia & New Zealand, who joined Google from LookSmart to set up the Australian operation four years ago. Vale said, the new Australian HQ was "a place where we have built teams to support advertisers including client service managers for our direct and agency clients and business development managers to build strong partnerships with local business". It is now one of more than 20 Google offices around the world. "Sydney is the centre for our Australia and New Zealand operations, but we have recently opened an office in Melbourne to support our Victorian advertisers and we are recruiting to bolster our presence in New Zealand," Vale said. "According to Nielsen NetRatings, Google is visited by more than 7.5 million unique users in Australia making it the number one web site in Australia. Approx 85 percent of all web page searches in Australia are served by Google." Vale added that more than half of Google searches and one third of its revenues now came from outside US. Lars Rasmussen, head of engineering for Google Australia, said the engineering centre would draw on the talent pool of computer scientists and engineers from within Australia and throughout the region. "We're looking forward to providing them the opportunity to work on many exciting new Google products that touch millions of our users worldwide." Rasmussen added: "We are hiring as fast as we can find qualified candidates. Our total workforce was 6790 at 31 March, and about 25 percent of the workforce in Sydney are technical." He said the limit to the company's growth was its ability to find suitably qualified people. "Google has perhaps one of the highest hiring bars for technical talent of any company in the world and the number of engineers we need to fulfil our mission does not exist in any one place and that is why we are looking far and wide for the people we need and building engineering centres around the world." The company's R&D in Australia started in late 2004 when Google acquired Where 2 Technologies, a mapping company founded by Rasmussen, his brother and two Australian friends. "We formed about half of the team that put out Google Maps about a year ago and once we had done that we started lobbying to have a fully-fledged engineering centre in Sydney, Rasmussen said. "The Sydney engineers still form a very significant part of the team that is working on Google Maps and I think that fact is going to make Google Australia an extremely attractive place for the top programmers and computer scientists to seek employment. "The lion's share of our research here is original research that will benefit tens if not hundreds of millions of Google users around the world." Google has also announce two initiatives to help it recruit the cream of IT talent from Australian universities. The Google Australia Summer Internship programme will commence in Summer 2006/7, offering opportunities for both technical and non-technical talent to work in Google during the summer vacation. This will eventually become a year round intern programme. Rasmussen said: "We are also starting a full time campus recruitment programme. Next week we will be doing full day outreaches here and in Melbourne giving technical talks and meeting with students and professors." Google is also expanding the Google Global Community Scholarship programme to Australia. It awards travel grants for women students to visit the world largest IT conference for women, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, held in San Diego.
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