For Microsoft, India is becoming a very attractive market for its cloud business. According to Mircosoft top executives, company’s cloud business in India is growing at much faster pace compared to other global markets.
?18 months ago, we got our cloud targets and during this phase we started to see India as one of the fastest growing market for Azure cloud,? Microsoft India’s Managing Director, Karan Bajwa told reporters in Bangalore on sidelines of a two day Windows Azure conference 2014.
?Globally, our Azure cloud business is growing over 200 percent year on year but in India we are growing at even faster rate. We are adding more than 2000 commercial cloud customers every month. These customers are across verticals and different sizes including small, mid market as well as large enterprises,? Bajwa informed.
?Microsoft is powering the cloud transition in India with Windows Azure and a set of comprehensive offerings across private, hybrid and public clouds. We are adding over 2000 commercial cloud customers every month in India and they are across all industry ? banking, manufacturing, healthcare and media, and across large, mid-sized and small companies,? said Bhaskar Pramanik, Microsoft India’s Chairman.
Quoting a Zinnov study, Pramanik pointed that adopting hybrid cloud is the way for large enterprises to move forward and enterprises can save 35 to 45 percent cost over standalone private cloud deployments.
Company cities, the popularity of Azure cloud among Indian enterprises is largely because it offers scalability, reduces cost, flexibility, business agility and speed to roll-out new services.
In past 18 months or so, Microsoft India has been strategically working to give a big push to build a cloud ecosystem in the country involving system integrators (SIs), partners, independent software vendors (ISVs) along with startups.
In fact, company has some 10,000 partners along a strong base of 1.6 million developers in India that are involved in driving the cloud ecosystem here. Microsoft’s cloud partner ecosystem grew 200 percent last year, while the count of ISV application on Azure cloud witnessed a 100 percent growth. Some 1,700 startups are using Azure cloud through Microsoft’s BizSpark program.
To drive the Windows Azure cloud offerings that involves software as a service (Saas), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), company has made $15 billion investments in its global data centre infrastructure and networks. However, Microsoft, presently has no data centre in India.
?Our investments in improving the readiness of our partners and developers is enabling faster cloud adoption. We are in a mobile-first, cloud-first world and cloud is becoming an integral part of the IT infrastructure in Indian enterprises today,? Bajwa added.
According to Bajwa, India’s top five SIs are using Azure cloud for its internally purpose as well as using to build applications and roll out services to their customers. The cloud revenue is expected to jump from 5 to 15 percent over next few years.
Though company didn’t disclose customers name using Windows Azure, but said three top private banks, five key auto makers, three media houses and four healthcare companies including Fortis Healthcare are among the enterprise customers’ list in India.
