Microsoft cloud makes early gains in India

MUMBAI, INDIA: Microsoft Corporation, though a late entrant into cloud offerings space in India, is slowly but surely seeing strong momentum in attracting customers.   

It's not been a year, since the company launched range of cloud-solutions in India including cloud productivity, application development, hosting and private clouds. And already, the cloud offerings have become quite popular across small and large enterprise customers.

Also Read: Microsoft brings cloud management soln to India

“In India, we have over 1,300 customers for our cloud productivity solution — Microsoft Online Services (MOS), which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync and other services. We are also seeing a strong momentum with around 50-100 customers signing up every month on MOS,” said Charmaine Lewis Wali, director - Cloud Computing, Microsoft Corporation India. 

Apart from the cloud offerings, even the Windows Azure has attracted many start-ups and software developers to leverage its capabilities. “Windows Azure, our cloud-based application development and hosting service has also seen a significant adoption by start-ups and developers as over 8,500 applications created from India in less than a year from the launch,” she added.

She said that over 600 enterprises have signed up for Windows Azure so far, while over 300 partners have signed up to build applications on the platform and 25,000 developers have been trained on the platform.

Though Microsoft has a mix base of customers including large enterprises, Wali pointed that there's a strong adoption among SMBs as a segment and has emerged as key drivers of cloud-based productivity solutions adoption in India.

The platform has been adopted by BFSI, manufacturing, IT/ITeS and media verticals, while the MOS customers are spanning across industries like retail, logistics, ITeS/other services, consumer goods, auto industrial and aerospace manufacturing and financial services such as life insurance, capital markets and securities.

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Microsoft cloud business strategy

“At Microsoft we believe that we are at an inflection point in cloud adoption and believe that the market will continue to adopt our cloud product and service offerings. We will continue to invest our resources in readying the partner and developer on our cloud offerings and lead by way of the applications that are developed and consumed on Microsoft technologies,” Wali explained.

Further, “MOS and cloud solutions bring the power of enterprise-class IT to businesses of all classes and sizes; and promises power of productivity and intelligent experience to businesses and solutions are expected to continue gaining strong traction among businesses,” she added. 

According to Frost & Sullivan's Information and Communications Technology Practice — South Asia & Middle East, the SMBs share close to 90 per cent of the Universe Estimation for the enterprises in India. This segment is more inclined towards On-Demand products due to the multi-fold benefits of zero capex investment, scalability and flexibility and attractive business models.

Cloud market in India

Also, according to Frost & Sullivan, the cloud computing market in India is estimated to be around Rs 506 crore and is expected reach around Rs 4600 crore by 2015 with a CAGR of 46.5 per cent.  

Currently, SaaS (software as a service) contributes Rs 303.6 crore, while PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) combined share 44.5 per cent of the total estimated market.

In terms of cloud market growth, Frost & Sullivan observes that cloud solutions promise to offer the added advantage of contributing to green-technology adoption, and will bring in a vast change in the “IT” of an enterprise and offers multi-fold benefits.

Interestingly, Microsoft is not a lone player in India's cloud market as its already getting crowded with old and new players like Salesforce.com, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Communications, Reliance Communications, Netmagic and many others that offer various cloud-based services.

Even with crowded cloud market, Microsoft is optimistic to establish itself by understanding and fulfilling customers needs.

“Our goal for the next 18 months is to grow our partner eco-system to better meet our customers’ requirements. Our scheduled launches of CRM online and Office 365 would further add to the momentum. We are also helping the customer decision making process on the cloud by arming them with in-depth information and evidence on the benefits of the cloud,” Wali observed.