Looking at the mobile proliferations and burgeoning entrepreneurship spirit in India, Microsoft India is all set to provide world class cloud services to the Indian users by setting up its first local data centre in India for its commercial cloud based services.
This is likely to change the scenario as the lack of a local data centre was a big hindrance for large data users like banks, healthcare and education institutes to not to move to cloud. With this move Microsoft has become the first Cloud company to host its data center locally, which will trigger more SMBs, governments and banks to take a first step onto the cloud.
At present Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure portfolio includes more than 100 datacenters located in 40 countries, including Amsterdam, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, China, Ireland,Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. The portfolio includes both owned and leased facilities that support customer’s cloud services globally. Microsoft manages more than 1 million high performance processing and storage servers in its global cloud infrastructure portfolio.
It delivers more than 200 online services worldwide to over 20 million businesses in 90+ marketplaces, and as demand accelerates for cloud services, the software giant is experiencing significant growth in its cloud infrastructure. To keep up with the demand, it is continuously exploring new potential datacenter locations and local capacity planning options to support customers worldwide.
The cloud services will be operating fromthree local data centre located in three cities will be ready by end of 2015.
“Calling it as a logical step for Indian MARKET
to host its data centre, which will further strengthen Microsoft’s commitment to the Indian market and its stakeholders,” said Bhaskar Parmanik, Chairman, Microsoft India.
This big announcement was being made by Microsoft CEO’s Satya Nadella on Tuesday in New Delhi. “Microsoft is deeply committed to helping people and organisation thrive in our mobile first and cloud first world, with more than 900 million users are of cell phones, 250 million users are of smartphones, and this trend is bound to grow. For every connected smartphones cloud infrastructure is needed for hosting data, apps and intelligence. We want to be leader in providing cloud services to every Indian, and every Indian application and developers.”
In his remarks he highlighted that, “In India the cloud opportunities is of $2 trillion. Micorosft has been helping companies for providing cloud infrastructure. This new move, is going to help Indian companies, govt and enterprise to revitalize the productivity of this economy. Some of the Indian companies who are en-cashing cloud service are in Fortis Hospital, Bajaj Finance, HCL are the early adopters.”
Last year, Microsoft India grew over 100 percent its cloud business, buoyed by the success, the company launched its Data center, which would enable Cloud services like Azure, which is a cloud infrastructure service as well as Office 365, a productivity and collaboration operated out locally.
Nadella also emphasized that, “Having a local data center will open up plethora of opportunities for its 10,000 partners, which will be making available to every vertical industry. We will enable this burgeoning entrepreneurship spirit of India to able to create indigenous experiences that power all the endpoints of cloud. Hence this a beginning a of a new chapter of mobile first and cloud first era. Today, we have the broadest eco system of partners and the most partner friendly approach and scale. We don’t need to go hunt for one deal. We want to have ubiquity of access in partner opportunity.”
Several Microsoft partners, like HCL Infosystems, TCS, Wipro and ISVs such as MartJack, Newgen software, Nucleus, have built cloud offerings with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. Over the last year, the number of Microsoft’s cloud solution partners has increased by more than 200% and the numbers of ISV applications has grown by 100%.
Commenting on Nadella first visit to India, Kartik Shah, one of the major partners of Microsoft said, “I would expect Microsoft to work with India to be a catalyst in inclusive growth story of India. So it will be an expectation from me as partner to see how he conveys this to India and how Microsoft and India can align on common goals and vision.”
Nadella was in India on a two day tour to highlight India’s importance for Microsoft and underscore how technology is a key enabler to help people and businesses thrive in the mobile-first, cloud- first world.
