Microsoft aims to be the leader of the intelligent cloud in India

After taking over the sales, marketing and services operations of Microsoft in India last week from Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik, Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India has shared his vision for transforming Microsoft India.

In a video message, he told about Microsoft's focus around empowering customer and enabling partners- the things he would like to accelerate further. He spoke on how Microsoft is working towards empowering entrepreneurs and powering innovations to make Digital India a reality.

"We would like to ensure that we're seen as the leader of our three bold ambition which is ensuring more computing everywhere, ensuring more productivity and support for business processes for all corporate clients and being the leader of the intelligent cloud in India. I'd really like to ensure that we perform, transform and learn together," reiterated Maheshwari.

Here's the key focus areas highlighted in his message:

Digital India:

Digital India is such a unique opportunity for India to leapfrog areas which have not seen the 2nd and 3rd industrial revolution, and go directly to the 4th industrial revolution. It's a great enabler for India. Given our investments in the country, we are uniquely positioned to make a digital India. While we can do all the solutioning, we need the entrepreneurship of partners. There's is so much to do, and I would say, we would need the partners to do it all.

ISV and Startup focus: 

Indian business, I would say, runs on entrepreneurship. The startup and the ISV community are the representation of that entrepreneurship. We are deeply committed to this ecosystem.

Our accelerators in this country, works with a number of startups working through different stages of their growth and enabling them to scale up. Our efforts with the broader ISV community is focused on creating big leaders of tomorrow.

Microsoft is doing a lot of work in augmented reality, with Cortana Intelligence suite, around artificial intelligence, around machine learning in the IoT space, and also working through quantum computing and many other new forms of breakthrough innovation. Now that is something Microsoft will continue to provide as tools to the ISVs, but the real innovation has to be done by the ISVs in creating new solutions.

Microsoft will continue to provide support as a partner and also provide the go-to-market support that we have. But ISVs will need to learn and do more as we scale up. Through our marketplace, ISVs can start in one geography, but then have the ability through this network to provide similar solutions on your solutions in different parts of the world.