As Microsoft battles for its share of an estimated $100 billion market opportunity stemming from India’s digital transformation, the tech giant is expanding its cloud offerings in the country.
Microsoft said Wednesday that it has launched its Azure Stack service in India, which will complement the company’s full array — private, public and hyrbid — of already available cloud services in the country.
Azure Stack is an extension of Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, and “brings the agility and fast-paced innovation of cloud computing to on-premises environments and enables entirely new hybrid cloud scenarios,” the company said in a statement. All of Microsoft’s Azure Stack partners, including HP, Dell, EMC, Lenovo and Cisco, have started shipping Azure Stack to customers in India.
The software giant aims to bring the agility and fast-paced innovation of cloud computing to on-premises environments and enable entirely new hybrid cloud scenarios.
“As the pace of digital transformation picks up in 2018, we recognize that many customers prefer to evolve gradually by first moving to a hybrid cloud environment before fully embracing the public cloud,” Microsoft India President Anant Maheshwari said in a statement. “With Azure Stack, we will help our customers move forward in their preferred digital transformation path at a pace they prefer.”
Microsoft is battling Amazon and Google in India, and Maheshwari recently said he believes the IT landscape in the country has changed from being focused on mobile and cloud to “artificial intelligence and all the cognitive capabilities inside the cloud.”
“You put all of that together and it starts becoming more than $100 billion dollar opportunity for all of us,” he said.
Microsoft is already heavily invested in the country. The company has three global data centers located in the country, and says it works with more than 200,000 enterprises, 29 state governments and more than 5,000 startups.
