As the Indian cloud market gets increasingly competitive, Microsoft is sharpening focus on security, high-end computing applications and developer community building services on cloud to drive growth in the country.
So far, Microsoft has a dominant market share in the Indian public cloud services market, which according to Gartner Technology Research, is projected to grow 30.4% in 2016 to total $1.26 billion. However, with Amazon Web Services launching two data centres in the past week, the market is all set to become more competitive.
The Redmond, Washington-based company is betting on its hyper scale (scalable compute architecture), hybrid cloud model which provides high end security and computing services around big data , analytics and internet of things to differentiate from competitors like Amazon, IBM and Google.
Peter Gartenberg, GM, Enterprise Partner Group, Microsoft India :
We are an enterprise grade cloud and it is hybrid, which is a unique point about us. Hybrid means our customers can keep data on their on-premise data centres and use our cloud for computing. We integrate these two seamlessly.
On AWS entering India, Gartnerberg said Microsoft cloud business is in a different space, which focusses on high-end security and computing requirements.
However, with AWS and IBM looking to tap Indian consumers for Infrastructure as a service, which which is the fastest-growing segment of Indian public cloud market and is forecast to reach $448.9 million by year end, according to Gartner, it does put slight pressure on Microsoft, say industry experts.
India has become more prominent in company’s global scheme of things with a majority of Indian enterprises looking to ride on the digitization wave, that is moving data and processing on cloud to cut cost and improve efficiency, and Indian government’s pushing forward its flagship program Digital India.
Microsoft, which launched three data centres in September 2015 in India, has seen 100% growth in revenues from its cloud services in India in the past couple of years. At present, it has 52 of the top 100 Indian companies by market capitalisation listed on the BSE as its cloud customers. This unprecedented growth has made the cloud business the largest business for Microsoft in India.
This is also evident from the fact that of the 32 Azure regions (data centres) it has announced, India already has three of them. US, which is the company’s largest market, has 10 of these Azure regions, while Europe has six of them. China and Hong Kong have two and one data centres respectively.
For more on Microsoft and it’s ambitions in India, check out the full article at http://www.business-standard.com/article/international/microsoft-sharpens-focus-on-cloud-services-in-india-116070700199_1.html