Microsoft powering cloud transition in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft India announced that a significant portion of its growth in India in the last 12 months has come from its cloud businesses.

"Microsoft is powering the cloud transition in India with Windows Azure and a set of comprehensive offerings across private, hybrid and public clouds," said Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman, Microsoft India, at the Windows Azure Conference in Bengaluru.

"We are adding over 2000 commercial cloud customers every month in India and these are customers across all industry sectors - banking, manufacturing, healthcare and media, and across large, mid-sized and small companies."

Windows Azure enterprise customers in India include:

- Three leading private banks

- Five leading auto manufacturers

- Four leading healthcare organizations

- Three leading media houses

- Five leading Indian SIs are also building solutions on Windows Azure for global consumption.

Scalability, reduced costs, flexibility, business agility and speed in new service roll-out are some of the reasons enterprises in India are attracted to cloud services. With its large partner and developer eco-system, Microsoft is helping Indian organisations assess and transition to the cloud easily. Microsoft has 10,000 partners and engages with an ecosystem of 1.6 million developers in the country.

Microsoft has been investing significantly to improve cloud capabilities among partners and developers. In the last year, the company has grown the number of its cloud solution partners by 200 percent, has seen a 100 percent growth in the number of independent software vendor (ISV) applications on Windows Azure and helped 1,700 start-ups adopt Windows Azure.

Microsoft is also partnering with academic institutions to create Microsoft Innovation Centers - of which 39 are now operational. The company has conducted 2,000 training sessions for over 200,000 developers and IT professionals in the last year.

"Azure is a powerful platform for the entire Indian ecosystem of IT professionals, developers and start-ups to bring their applications to market worldwide. It helps Indian customers leapfrog to the cloud, and accrue significant cost savings. It provides a unique opportunity for our partners to scale their business. I believe the opportunities ahead for India with the Azure cloud platform are tremendous," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, in his address via a video message to the participants of the Windows Azure Conference in Bengaluru.