IT Inc welcomes PM’s Digital India initiative

MUMBAI, INDIA: PM Narendra Modi, who released his vision for a Digital India yesterday, has also managed to charm IT conglomerates at home and abroad.

The initiative is being appreciated not only by India Inc, but also CEOs of large conglomerates like Microsoft and Oracle.

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, wrote, “Microsoft is proud to be a part of Digital India launch and believes that technology can uniquely support the government’s initiatives in key areas including: rural Internet connectivity, digital cloud services and communications and productivity services for the Government.”

“In fact, to help drive this transformation, we are bringing cloud services – Microsoft Azure, Dynamics and Office 365 – to local data centers in India. We believe that the democratizing force of software and digital technology will enable India’s future innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams, Indian businesses to transform and seize the opportunities ahead and enable the talent and ingenuity of the human capital in India to thrive,” he continued.

I would like to congratulate and extend my best wishes to the Honorable Prime Minister, and the Honorable IT Minister and every Indian citizen and business on this occasion. I look forward to seeing how technology can enable India’s transformation in the years ahead.

According to Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President, Sales, Asia, Pacific and Japan, Symantec, the Digital India program can empower inclusive and sustainable growth by harnessing the power of talent and technology to create the India of tomorrow. With initiatives such as countrywide broadband access and digital locker linked with Aadhaar and mobile, the possibilities are endless.

“However, people, their information and country’s critical information infrastructure need to be properly and adequately secured. Recognizing the goals of the Digital India agenda and inspired by the vision of the Honorable Prime Minister Modi and Minister for Communication and Information Technology Symantec recently announced a partnership with NASSCOM to train 50,000 cyber security professionals,” he said.

Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director & Head, Government Business, Oracle India, remarked, “Our conviction that India will be one of the foremost countries in the world became stronger last year when the initiative was announced and now our excitement has reached a crescendo. We feel Digital India is no longer an initiative by the government it has evolved into a revolution, a movement.”

Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India & Saarc, said, “Digital India is one of the most significant transformations the country will witness by eventually connecting over a hundred crore people of India, with technology as its focal point.”

He added that the initiative is set empower citizens to use the digital infrastructure as a utility. A digitally enabled nation also means influx of data or influx of terabytes. Digital India would create a huge influx of terabytes and this would mean that the integrity, storage, archival, retrieval and portability of data would be of paramount importance. The government will need to deploy scale out architectures which can scale as the data volumes grow.

Digital India’s success would also be a function of the underlying technology infrastructure with data becoming the nucleus of this thrust, Valluri concluded.