Microsoft launches commercial cloud services from local datacentres in India

NEW DELHI: Microsoft on Tuesday launched its local data centres in India, which will offer its Azure cloud services, much earlier than its deadline of December this year, a move that will help it build more confidence among the government, Indian companies and small and medium businesses in the country.

The centres are being launched at Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. "The hyper scale cloud will empower governments, businesses and users and offer enough computing power that will support all their existing workloads," said Bhaskar Pramanik, Microsoft India chairman.

While Microsoft Azure services were launched on Tuesday, the commercial Office 365 services would be available from October and Dynamics CRM Online services will be made available from the first half of 2016.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella had announced the setting up of the cloud centres almost exactly a year ago in India, pegging the cloud opportunity in the country at nearly $2 trillion. Experts had welcomed the move, agreeing that local data centres would give Microsoft more muscle to complete in the Indian market, especially in the government and regulated sectors such as banking, finance and state owned enterprises.

The company also said it has seen "significant interest" from over 125 customers in the BFSI, government departments and organisations, ISVs, ecommerce organisations and startups in an early preview programme that allowed customers to take a look at the services that will be offered by Microsoft.

Competition in the cloud market is increasing with players such as IBM spending millions of rupees advertising its Softlayer cloud, and even Oracle making a push in the Indian market with the announcement of several new cloud offerings for different industries.