If all goes as planned, Microsoft will soon offer Azure and Office 365 - its commercial and cloud services from three new local data centres in India. Microsoft is planning to make these services available by the end of next year. This step by the tech giant will make it the first technology company to ever set up cloud data centres in India. According to experts, this move by Microsoft will have the US based company compete better in the local market.
“When we think about the cloud opportunity in India itself, it is going to be a $2 trillion opportunity,” said, Satya Nadella, Chief Executive, Microsoft in New Delhi on Tuesday. Nadella also added that this move by Microsoft will benefit and help entrepreneurs, Indian companies and government. Nadella did not disclose the investment amount involved in setting up the data centres but said they will have ‘sizeable’ capacity.
This announcement by Microsoft is quite important given the ruling party, BJP’s views about bringing local data centres to the country in order to maintain the data sovereignty. Besides this, a lot of Indian enterprises have long been hesitant and worried about hosting their data on public cloud because none of the major data players like Google, Microsoft or Amazon Web Service have their data centres in the country.
“I think in two or three years, when the servers come to India, the public cloud market will become more interesting because now there are some territorial issues in holding the data in the country,” said, Jagdish Belwal, CIO at Tata Motors in a recent interview given to Economic Times. Tata Motors makes use of Amazon Web Services.
According to Vishal Tripathi’s statement to Economic Times, Microsoft’s move to set up a local data centre will give the company “more muscle” to compete in the cloud services market and “Office 365 could see higher adoption”. Vishal Tripathi is a Principal research analyst at Gartner.
With players such as IBM spending millions on advertising its Softlayer cloud and Oracle trying hard in the Indian market by announcing several more new offerings, the competition in the cloud market has increased like never before.
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