Microsoft has launched Edu-Cloud, a cloud computing based offering to provide digital learning and teaching in schools and higher educational institutions.

Announcing this at a press conference here on Tuesday, Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik said Edu-Cloud will enhance the productivity of teachers and students with applications for teaching, learning, and administrative processes. The students will have to use a tablet or any computing device to use the service.

On the financial aspects of the service, he said: ``It will be purely a commercial relationship with our clients and there will be an annual fee. We will provide the entire software and technology as a service offering.’’

Microsoft has also announced a tie-up with the Chaitanya group of educational institutions which will adopt Edu-Cloud as the first tie-up for the offering. The Hyderabad-based corporate education group has already got 14,000 students with tablets to use Edu-Cloud.

It plans to reach out to about 1,500 educational institutes over the next 18 months to provide the service. ``The offering is expected to benefit 10 lakh teachers and 60 lakh students in this period,’’ he claimed.

DATA CENTRES

With reference to Microsoft's announcement last year about setting up three cloud data centres in India, Pramanik said: ``We are happy to announce that these three hyper scale data centres have already been set up and we will be launching services before the end of the current calendar year.’’

While two data centres have been set up in the western part of the country, another is in south India, he said, while refusing to reveal exact locations.

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