NEW DELHI, INDIA: Microsoft India today unveiled its end to end offering for customers, partners and developers in India. To mark the occasion, Microsoft India also announced commercial availability of the Windows Azure Platform, an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft's datacentres, as per a press release. 

The release adds the company's claim that - This makes Microsoft the only company today that is ready to make customers' journey to the cloud real with enterprise-class cloud-based offerings across all three service layers in the cloud including infrastructure, platform, and software applications.

Today's move will enable companies in India to strengthen their IT roadmap by including the cloud as a core component of their strategy to drive higher productivity and efficiencies. 'Microsoft has always led the industry in the software space. With businesses looking to the cloud to bring higher efficiencies, it is natural for us to extend our strength and expertise of the past 15 years in the cloud space and offer the value of our experience to customers.' said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft India.

It includes three service layers which are SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. While with the Windows Azure Platform, Microsoft is making the Platform available as a service, over the last two years Microsoft has already launched several products and solutions in India across other layers as part of its Cloud Strategy for Enterprises. These include hosted Dynamics, Office Web Apps, Microsoft Online Services [comprising Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, and Office Live meeting], Windows Server, SystemCentre and the Dynamic Data Centre Toolkit 'This completes our cloud stack.' said Mr Anandan. 'All of our popular products are already cloud-ready, and we have a clear future roadmap to provide anytime, anywhere access across diverse devices spanning computer, mobile and Internet. We are ready today to help customers leverage the benefits of cloud services.'

Cost efficiencies are being seen as one of the key benefits of the cloud computing paradigm. "SMBs in India are looking for low cost solutions without the hassle of running an in-house infrastructure. Windows Azure is not only a reliable and scalable platform for customers to access online services, but also enables us to create feature-rich applications for different devices and a large set of users without worrying about IT infrastructure". said Ajay Gandhi, MD Wings Infonet Ltd Infonet Ltd.

Microsoft's estimates reveal that with the Windows Azure Platform, customers and partners can realize a reduction in Total Cost of Operations of key workloads by up to 30 to 40 per cent over a three year period, adds the company.

"The ease of application development including the advantage of interoperability with other platforms and programming languages gives us a plethora of opportunities to deploy applications for a large user set. Further, the customers are able to store the data on Azure and manage it with ease and convenience that in turn significantly reduces IT costs for them. We see immense potential for Azure and cloud based services among Indian enterprises in the coming months'said Gaurav Mantri, Founder CEO of Cerebrata Software P Ltd. "The security and reliability offered by Windows Azure is expected to attract a large customer base on the cloud which we believe should increase the adoption of the services model for critical sectors such as banking and government," said Nagaraja Prakasam, Managing Director, South and Southeast Asia, CDC Software