Microsoft, the technology giant, has decided to spend Rs.1,400 crore on setting up three data centres in India. The US based software company took this step after it saw a $2 trillion promise in the country’s cloud market. According to a filing with the Registrar of Companies, the company has already started the work on setting up their cloud data centres in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune. The local centres are being setup by the technology giant with an aim of capturing the Indian market, especially customers having data sovereignty concerns in the telecom and banking centres.
The software giant was successful in earning a total sum of Rs. 2,261 crore from India in the financial year from 2013-2014. This has made India amongst the fastest growing cloud market for Microsoft with about 2,000 customers added each month. Microsoft is hoping to increase the scale of its cloud offerings by setting up more and more data centres all round the globe.
“The biggest cloud data centres we have globally are capable of handling 600,000 servers in just one region. That’s a massive amount of compute. Increasing this scale helps us in being more competitive”, said Azure Jason Zanders, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft in a statement to Economic Times.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer had announced that he saw the India cloud computing market as a $2 trillion market opportunity. He made this announcement during his visit to the country in September.
Many top cloud players have shown keen interest in the Indian market and are coming up to set up their cloud centres in the country. IBM successfully launched a centre this month in Mumbai and has future plans of setting up another one very soon. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had also indicated in September that the company might set up centres in India. This situation is quite different from what it was a year ago when most of the companies ignored India citing problems like patchy internet connection, infrastructural issues, unreliable optical fiber connectivity and unpredictable power supply etc.
“There is a huge demand for cloud services in India, especially among SMBs because of the companies like Microsoft are willing to spend so much on setting up data centres in India”, said Sanchit Gogia, Chief analyst, Greyhound Research in a statement to the Economic Times.
In order to ensure a more faster and reliable bandwidth, the software giant is in direct talks with telecom companies which will connect large enterprises directly to their data centres.
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