India fastest growing for MS Cloud biz, but won't have a data centre for now - Economic Times ~ Electronic Gadgets

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BANGALORE: Chief information officers at various Indian organisations waiting to host their applications and email solutions on a local Microsoft data centre for cloud services will have to wait a little longer. Microsoft India chairman Bhaskar Pramanik said India was the fastest growing market for its cloud business Microsoft Azure and Office 365 applications, but the Redmond, California-based software giant would serve the nation's customers from global centres. "Currently , all our cloud services are provided through data centres which are located globally . At this moment, we don't have any data centre here in India," Pramanik said.

These global centres are seen to provide the same level "latency" or the time it takes for data to hop from point to point on the network as in any other Microsoft market and an India-located data centre wasn't needed for that, another Microsoft official told ET. Globally, the Azure business was growing at 200% annually, and India was adopting it even faster, Pramanik told reporters after the opening of a two-day cloud conference organised by the company in Bangalore. Over the two days, Microsoft is showcasing some of the advances it has made in cloud computing, software developer and customer success stories in India. The cloud market was growing across all sectors such as banking, manufacturing, healthcare and media.

According to a Gartner report, public cloud services market in India is expected to grow from $423 million in 2013 to $1,300 million in 2017. Today, Microsoft India works with private banks, auto manufacturers, media houses, ecommerce companies such as Getit, Mobius Knowledge Services, E-reasoning and healthcare organisations like Fortis Healthcare. In the past few months, Fortis, for example, moved all its applications to cloud including ERP, CRM, email and collaboration solutions. "In the past 12-18 months we have seen a lot of traction around cloud, adding over 2,000 customers every month," said Karan Bajwa, managing director, Microsoft India.

Cloud technology allows organisations to put their data on the internet, on storage networks provided by the services providers. This not only provides a business ease of accessing data anywhere and anytime from internet , but also helps reduce investments made on internal data centres. Microsoft has 10 data centres globally excluding two exclusive centres in China, a bigger market than India for the software company. The company is aggressively looking at the next frontier of cloud market that comprises small and medium businesses . At present it has over 200,000 customers in the SMB space who use software including operating system, email, collaboration, and office tools. Microsoft's Azure faces competition from Amazon Web Services and other providers such as Rackspace.

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