Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at their meeting in Silicon Valley that the company would soon announce data centres in India that would focus on offering cloud services. The company is planning three data centres in the country, two in the west and one in the south, Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of Microsoft India, said.
“India is one of the first countries outside the US where we have made such big investments in data centres. It will be one of the largest footprints in terms of data centre capacity in India. It will have the highest levels of security and privacy. In terms of scale, scope and capability, we are going to change the way computing will happen here,” he said. Some 125 companies have already signed up for trials on these data centres since July when Microsoft opened up the centres for private previews. The public launch is expected over the next few days.
For Microsoft, the move is particularly significant because they have traditionally depended on selling proprietary software such as the Windows operating system and the Office suite. With data centres, it will also get to play in the hardware and services segments. “We can now address more than 80% of the $52 billion Indian IT industry (hardware, software and services). With only software, we were playing in a $4 billion market (Microsoft has a 30% share of that),” Pramanik said.
