Digital India: Microsoft to focus on rural internet, cloud solution

NEW DELHI: Supporting the Digital India initiative, world's largest software maker Microsoft Corp today said it will help the government in efforts to "transform" the country through technological innovations.

In a video message on the occasion of launch of Digital India week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said technology can support the government's initiatives in key areas of the programme including rural internet connectivity, digital cloud services for all and communications and productivity services for the government.

"At Microsoft, our focus is on empowering every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. Likewise, the Digital India initiative is focused on harnessing the power of technology to help India transform," he said.

The democratising force of software and digital technology, he said, will enable India's future innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams, Indian businesses to transform and seize the opportunities ahead and enable the talent and ingenuity of the human capital in India to thrive.

"In fact, to help drive this transformation we are bringing our marquee cloud services - Microsoft Azure, Dynamics and Office 365 - to local datacenters in India to accelerate cloud innovation, connect every Indian and every Indian business to the world through our global hyper-scale cloud," he said.

He congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the initiative saying he is looking forward to seeing how technology can enable India's transformation in the years ahead.