As India begins to witness a digital transformation, Microsoft has pegged the opportunity in the ‘intelligent cloud and intelligent edge’ business at $107 billion for various players enabling it.
While the market opportunity triggered by PCs in 1995 was $597 million, in 2005, mobile-first-cloud-first offered a market of $59.6 billion.
Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, says the opportunity that intelligent cloud and intelligent edge offers is much bigger for the players in the space over the next 12-18 months.
Addressing the inaugural ceremony of the two-day Microsoft India Media Days here on Wednesday, he made a presentation on ‘Making Digital Transformation a Reality with the Cloud’.
He said artificial intelligence could help the GDP grow, by supporting education, healthcare, agriculture and other areas. AI can create richer demographics by improving quality of life.
With a network of over 9,000 partners in the country, the firm has over 8,000 employees with operations in 11 cities.
Rebalancing of HR
Asked whether the firm had gone for retrenchment, he replied in the negative, saying the firm redeployed employees in other skills.
“As we went down the path of digital transformation, we ramped up future-looking capabilities. We do a lot of reskilling. It is a rebalancing from one part of the company to another; this keeps happening.”
Cloud plans
“We are thinking on increasing cloud capacity. As we go forward, we will see whether we need to go for more locations or ramp up the capacity. I don’t have a specific time frame. I see a positive momentum,” Maheshwari said.
Three out of Microsoft’s 42 global data centre regions are in India — Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.
Azure Stack
Microsoft has announced the launch of Azure Stack, which is an extension of its Azure cloud platform. It helps businesses offer their services seamlessly from private and public clouds.
Major Azure Stack partners such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and Cisco have started shipping Azure Stack to customers in India.
“We work with over 2 lakh large, medium and small enterprises, 29 State governments, and over 5,000 start-ups in the country.”