Internet search giant Google plans to double the size of its engineering workforce in the country within the next two years to tap the growing cloud computing market, a senior company official said today.

According to Google India Head of Engineering Peeyush Ranjan, the IT major is gearing up to tap the Indian cloud computing market, which is still in its budding stages.

He said the company is keen to put in place technologies and an engineering team to cater to the market demand.

"We target the SMB market in India for cloud. The country, like China, is a very price-sensitive market and the small and medium businesses are showing interest in adopting the cloud model primarily due to the cost advantages at various points of its implementation," Ranjan said.

He said Google already has about three million clients in its cloud, out of which around one lakh major educational institutions, corporate and SMBs are from India.

"Between Google Bangalore and Hyderabad, we have a team of about 300 engineers working on cloud technologies. This is the largest cloud-focused team for the company outside the US now. In order to cater to the growing market opportunities, we are preparing to hire hundreds of engineers into this team," he said.

He, however, refused to provide the exact number of employees to be hired.

Google Apps, the company's cloud enterprises offering, has about 25 million active users.

"We are signing about 3,000 businesses every day and we are approaching the market through about 1,000 authorised resellers," he said.