Microsoft CEO meets Modi; keen to be partner in Digital India

Global IT giant Microsoft's chief executive officer Satya Nadella Friday met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi here. He is the third tech giant executive to meet Modi, after Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Earlier in the day, Nadella said the company is looking forward to partner with the 'Digital India' and 'Make in India' programmes of the Modi government.

"It's always fantastic for me personally to be in India and the conversation I had with the minister was wide ranging," Nadella told media persons after meeting Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

"I have an aspiration that in this mobile and cloud world, we can empower every individual citizen of India and every business organisation and institution in India to be able to try with new technology. So, I am looking forward to be a part of both the 'Digital India' and 'Make in India'," he added.

The Hyderabad-born Nadella said: "We are making huge investments in our data centres in particular, which we think can empower organisations in this country to be world class with the access to great technology."

Prasad said: "I have requested him to consider electronic manufacturing in India. I have also requested that Microsoft has a great profile in the field of social services, (and) digital literacy can be promoted. We had a very purposeful exchange. I am very happy and I warmly welcome him."

"I have suggested to him that we are keen if there are certain suggestions to give to further improve the Digital India concept. We are quite willing to accept. We are talking about the concept of other products that they are going to launch in India, including from digital locker to cloud to data centres. I have requested him to consider electronic manufacturing," the minister added.

With the aim to turn the country into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy, the Modi government has envisaged Rs.1 lakh crore Digital India project. Make in India is a national programme to transform India into a global manufacturing hub.

Nadella said the world is moving more towards "cloud and mobile".

"Our engagement on both these fronts is what you will see if you look at what we are trying to do with the cloud. One of the unique capabilities that we have is to help build data centers that are locally available in India but yet are world class infrastructure.

"But on top of that, we also have our server infrastructure which enables every business to have their own flexibility in standing up its data centre," he added.

Nadella was in India in September when he said the tech giant will offer its commercial cloud services -- Azure and Office 365 --by the end of 2015 from local data centres in India where the company sees a $2 trillion business opportunity.

"We have 10,000 partners working with us in India. We have opened up a huge opportunity for those 10,000 partners. One thing you can be sure of is that for every connected smartphone you need to have cloud infrastructure. We want to enable the burgeoning entrepreneurial experience of Indians. There can be no mobile-first without cloud-first world," Nadella said then.