Microsoft has seen higher rate of adoption of its cloud services in the country after setting up local infrastructure, and the company is now aiming for a market share of more than 40% in the next fiscal in this segment, a top company executive said.
The growth in cloud services has been driven by Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) and startups, along with verticals like banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), healthcare, ecommerce and the government sector, Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman for the company’s Indian unit, told.
“Cloud adoption is helped by the market itself, which has moved more to the cloud. We feel that we opened our data centres at the right time, and they acted as catalyst and further accelerated the trend. We are also seeing a move to Microsoft Azure,” Pramanik said.
Conglomerates like Reliance, Essar, L&T, Mahindra’s have also migrated to Microsoft’s cloud services. Further, the governments of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are also using the company’s services. “A number of ecommerce companies like Snapdeal, PepperFry, besides startups, which has been another phenomenal, have actually moved to the cloud,” he said.
The company has 150,000 customers in the SMB space, about 50,000 are acquired, and most of them are SaaS (software as a service) customers. Pramanik said usage is much higher in the SMB space than in large enterprise because they don’t want the hassle of owning large infrastructure.
As per an IDC report, Microsoft has 30% market share in the overall cloud business, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. In the SaaS business, the company has a 46% share.
As per research firm Gartner, India’s cloud services market is expected to touch $1.9 billion by 2018.
Competition in the Indian cloud market is rising with the increased focus by global data centre players. Amazon’s cloud service arm, Amazon Web Services–Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the space–has built its data centres in around five locations in Mumbai.
Cloud allows companies to experiment with new businesses in a more agile way without spending too much money or time. It also enables them to acquire fully-functional business capabilities (SaaS) or complete platform capabilities (IaaS or PaaS) where handcrafted solutions can be built.
Microsoft offers complete portfolio of cloud services through local data centres – Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and will soon announce availability of CRM Online. It claims its cloud penetration has reached 50% of top 100 Indian companies by market capitalisation in the first 200 days of local data centres becoming functional.
The company has 100 data centres all over the world in 19 regions in over 40 countries, including India. As the first public cloud provider from India, Microsoft had opened centres in three regions – central India (Pune), southern India (Chennai), and western India (Mumbai).
Pramanik said local data centres have allowed companies in the financial sector, which earlier couldn’t adopt data centre service based out of India due to security and privacy issues, to join and use Microsoft’s services. “The biggest advantages of having local data centres are security, privacy, and more importantly latency,” he said.
Microsoft, however, has only launched a fourth of the data centre capacity in India. “As we continue to utilise the capacity, we will launch remaining capacity. We built data centres for the long term,” Pramanik said.
Source: The Economic Times
Image Courtesy: Economic Times
