Cloud services high on Microsoft India priority list

Has dominant share of this expanding segment here but competition from other giants is rising

Microsoft, the information technology multinational, is raising its focus on security, high-end computing applications and developer community building services on the cloud.

Cloud computing is the term for using a network of remote servers, hosted on the internet, to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

Microsoft has a dominant market share in the Indian public cloud services market, which, says Gartner Inc, is projected to grow 30.4 per cent in 2016 to $1.26 billion (Rs 8,500 crore). With Amazon Web Services (AWS) launching two data centres last week, the market is set to become more competitive.

The US-based firm is betting on its hyper scale, hybrid cloud model which provides high-end security and computing services around big data  analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) to differentiate itself from competitors (like Amazon, IBM and Google), Peter Gartenberg, general manager at Microsoft India told this newspaper.

We are different from other cloud services in India, he says.

“We are an enterprise-grade cloud and hybrid, a unique point. Hybrid means our customers can keep data on their on-premise data centres and use our cloud for computing. We integrate these two seamlessly,” he said.

On AWS’ entry, Gartenberg said the Microsoft cloud business was in a different space, focusing on high-end security and computing requirements. “We play in different areas. While we provide software as a service, platform as a service, management as a service and IoT as a service, in addition to infrastructure as as service, AWS, if you look at it, is really more of  infrastructure as a service. Our Office 365 is the largest software as a service in India. They don’t have anything like that. They really started as infra as a service, actually very easy stuff for us, not very fancy.  They have done a good job with that. It is their focus. We do a lot more than that.”

Adding: “We are not feeling that much pressure. Though there is a competition, with people trying to offer some services like infrastructure as a service at slightly lower prices. But, when you move in premium services, demanding the highest level of computing and security services such as disaster recovery, we don’t see that much completion.”

Dismissively: “The reality is that they (our competitors) are not in the upper end of what we do, not even close. Also (in terms of) scale, IBM is very small in scale; I will not even call it hyper scale. AWS is hyper scale but I am not sure if they are hyper scale in India. It doesn’t have zero redundancy, which is surprising."  

However, with AWS and IBM looking to tap Indian consumers for infrastructure as a service, fastest-growing segment of the Indian public cloud market and forecast to reach $449 million by year-end, according to Gartner, it does put some pressure on Microsoft, say sector experts.

India has become more prominent in the company’s global scheme, with a majority of enterprises looking to ride on the digitisation wave -- moving data and processing on the cloud to cut cost and improve efficiency, and the central government pushing forward its Digital India programme.

Microsoft launched three data centres in September 2015 and has seen a doubling of revenues from cloud services in India in the past couple of years. At present, it has 52 of the top 100 Indian companies by market capitalisation listed on the BSE as cloud customers. This unprecedented growth has made the cloud business the largest segment for Microsoft in India.

Also evident from the fact that  of the 32 Azure regions (data centres) it has announced, India already has three of these. America, the company’s largest market, has 10 and Europe has six. China and Hong Kong have two and one data centres, respectively.

Globally, Azure is available in 140 countries, and is backed by $15 billion of investment in global data centre infrastructure, says the company.

Another focus area for Microsoft is independent software vendors (ISVs) or India’s rapidly growing developer community. “We have this massive eco-system of ISVs that are building on this platform. That is pretty unique in terms of hyper scale cloud. I don’t think anybody is attempting to do what we are doing,” Gartenberg said. “Supporting ISVs is a top priority for us.”