Microsoft may have missed the mobile race and traditionally worked in a closed ecosystem, but one revolution which it will certainly not miss out on is the Cloud that is gaining ground in India and around the world.

Satya Nadella, the third CEO of Microsoft who is credited with changing the direction of the company with a revised mission statement, wants to do exactly that. The company’s new mission statement reads: “Empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more”. Microsoft is open to working with companies and technologies with which it competes.

Currently, around 50 per cent of Microsoft’s India revenues comes from its cloud computing infrastructure and services, which were under 20 per cent just three to four years back. However, under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft aspires to be one of the forerunners in the cloud computing business, taking on rivals AWS, IBM and Google, say analysts.

“Microsoft Azure is the Swiss Army Knife of Cloud and not just a knife and is poised to be one of the forerunners of the Cloud wars that will play out in 2020-21. It is a multi-purpose cloud that can cater to the needs of large enterprises, the developer community and the digital-first economy of new age start-ups,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst of Greyhound Research.

Forging partnerships

He further said, “Microsoft has forged deep partnerships with Reliance Jio; it is expanding its engagement with new-age start-ups like Myntra, Ola, InMobi; is investing heavily in B2B start-ups by powering them with Azure and working closely with the Government to be empanelled as a priority partner for cloud. It also has Azure ARC as its hybrid, multi-cloud platform.”

At the Future Decoded Tech Summit in Bengaluru on Tuesday, Nadella said developers must dream about creating a broad cross-sectoral impact in the Indian economy in every sector including retail, healthcare, agri-tech. He said one of the most important responsibilities of the 4.2-million strong developer community in India — one of the largest communities in the world — must be to create a more inclusive world by building trust into technology, around privacy and AI models that are deployed, and core cyber security of assets and customers’ data.

Data sovereignty

“We have 57 data centre regions around the world; we have three regions in India. We will build the infrastructure for openness, so that every layer of the tech stack should meet the real world needs. As we are expanding around the world with all these regions, that means we are also maintaining all the data sovereignty/residency laws. If a start-up developer wants to build an app and reach the world, there can’t be a better time than now. We are compliant with all the regulations in the world”, said Nadella.

An analyst tracking Microsoft said Nadella is transforming Microsoft from a traditional on-premise software company to a cloud computing services company and has opened up the company to open source software/technologies; forged partnerships with other organisations and made significant investments in SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service).

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