Microsoft is powering the cloud transition in 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," Bhaskar added.

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.

"Our investments in improving the readiness of our partners and developers is enabling faster cloud adoption. We are in a mobile-first, cloud-first world and cloud is becoming an integral part of the IT infrastructure in Indian enterprises today," said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, Microsoft India.

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%, has seen a 100% growth in the number of independent software vendor (ISV) applications on Windows Azure and helped 1700 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 2000 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 Corporation in his address via a video message to the participants of the Windows Azure Conference in Bengaluru today.

Microsoft offers enterprise cloud, with best-in-class first party SaaS applications, and operates a public cloud that supports a broad range of third parties, across its IaaS and PaaS offerings. Microsoft delivers true hybrid cloud capabilities that provide multi-cloud mobility through several products and offerings.

o Microsoft delivers large-scale, business cloud apps like Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online and Yammer, as well as a large number of other services like Bing, Outlook.com and Xbox Live.

o Windows Azure is the only public cloud platform with massive, global scale that supports a broad ecosystem with fully supported infrastructure and platform services backed by a $15 billion investment in global data center infrastructure.

o Microsoft provides true hybrid cloud capabilities with cloud mobility and delivers hybrid solutions that help enterprises build their own clouds, enables them to move without friction across clouds, and lets them use the public cloud in conjunction with their existing infrastructure.

The adoption of cloud amongst enterprises in India is being led by hybrid cloud. A study conducted by Zinnov Consulting released today establishes hybrid cloud as the way forward for large enterprises. The study also shows that enterprises can save 35% to 45% in costs by adopting hybrid cloud, over standalone private cloud deployments.