Taking India to the cloud: Bhaskar Pramanik

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman, Microsoft India, the consumer is changing. Think about the fact that they will also be a part of the new workforce. They think differently. This generation wants to work and play at the same time. He was delivering the keynote at the Microsoft Azure 2014 conference.

Earlier, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, addressed the audience via teleconference. He said: "We are at a pivotal time in our industry developing for the mobile and the cloud, first. Azure enables you to grow your cloud-enabled businesses. It provides Indian businesses to leapfrog."

Adding to this, Pramanik said: "You are the ecosystem that will help transform India. CEOs are now more optimistic globally, than in the last four years. The first thing they say: we want to accelerate growth. So far, we have seen a lack of growth and inflation. Growth will come by providing more value to our customers. We also need to have a social impact. We also realize that we need to build strong partners and strong alliances."

CEOs were asked to identify three transformative global trends. They said:

* Technological advances

* Demographic shifts

* Shift in global economic power.

The challenges for CEOs are: how do you meet these? 81 percent CEOs said the biggest impact will be technological advances. 60 percent felt that there will be demographic shifts. 59 percent felt there will be a shift in the global economic power.

Cloud, social, mobility and big data are the huge shifts happening today. Microsoft has been a player in the consumer cloud services for the last 15-20 years.

Bing: +13 percent growth in users YoY and 5.6 billion queries per month.

MSN: 460+ million.

XBox Live: 48 million live members.

Skype: 1/3rd of all international phone traffic.

OneDrive: 250+ million people use OneDrive.

The Office 365 today has a $1.5 billion annual growth rate. There are 8 million customers on Yammer. Over 1,000 customers sign up for Azure daily. Microsoft has built a huge portfolio of commercial cloud offering -- private, public and hybrid cloud. We are also very comprehensive and open. We support Ruby, PHP, Java and Python.

Hybrid cloud is a unique capability. You can move to the cloud at your own space. Hybrid cloud is the most cost effective way of moving to the cloud. Every product Microsoft makes will be cloud ready.

Another offering is the enterprise-grade cloud. A commercial cloud has to be enterprise ready. "We operate over 1 million servers across the globe, at an investment of $15+ billion. We have dark fiber between hubs with multiple international edge points. We provide multi-level security as well," added Pramanik.

 

Nadella has said that India is a mobile first and cloud first country. Modern apps are at cloud scale. India can leapfrog with cloud savings. India has a huge opportunity in the cloud. Even SMBs can leapfrog into the cloud.

Pramanik noted: "We need the ecosystem to do all of this. We have tie-ups with the developers, IT professionals, ISVs and start-ups, and partners. We need the ecosystem to be with us and behind us."

He concluded by asking five questions of the CEOs and the various companies:

* What are you dong in your organization to innovate using the cloud and at scale?

* Do you have a strategy for the digital age? And the skills to deliver it?

* How are you using SMAC?

* How are you creating value for your business in entirely different ways?

* How are you creating new products and services based on customer feedback?

Microsoft has the most open, flexible and most comprehensive commercial cloud offering.