Microsoft to deliver cloud services from India, could give it edge over Google, AWS

An analyst with Gigaom Research, Janakiram has worked with Microsoft as a Technical Architect and with AWS as a Tech Evangelist.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with India’s human resource development minister Smriti Irani.

Satya Nadella had a busy schedule during his first visit to India about a week ago as Microsoft’s CEO. One of the key announcements he made was about Microsoft’s decision to deliver its flagship cloud services, Office 365, and Azure from local data centers in India.

Global presence is important for cloud providers to drive customer adoption. While there are concerns around latency and performance of hosting applications in remote data centers, data sovereignty matters the most for many enterprises. Microsoft Azure operates in fifteen regions, including Asia Pacific and Japan. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leader in cloud services, operates in ten regions, and has a dedicated cloud for the government and federal agencies in the US. Google and IBM SoftLayer are lagging behind in terms of their global footprint.

Now, Microsoft is inching closer to AWS both in global presence and features. It is rapidly adding new services every quarter.

Microsoft Azure is the only public cloud service to get featured in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). With customers like Lufthansa, easyJet and Xerox, Azure is witnessing steady growth.

Azure’s success is crucial for Microsoft’s Indian subsidiary. Some of the well known enterprises like Bajaj Finance, Fortis Hospitals, and Global eReasoning have chosen Microsoft’s cloud platform for running their workloads. Global system integrators, including TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro are partnering with Microsoft to offer high-end professional services to fortune 500 customers. Apart from enterprises and solution providers, Microsoft India is targeting startups through its exclusive Azure Accelerator setup in Bangalore.

With no data center presence from AWS and Google in India, Microsoft will have an edge. Given the long-standing relationship Microsoft has with the IT departments of Indian state governments and the National Informatic Center, a central government agency, Microsoft looks set to the win the government and public sector customers.

Microsoft’s aggressive cloud-first push is expected to take the company to the next level. A local data center in India is a step towards realizing its vision.

See: The age of network as a service: This startup can take your firm’s entire wide area network to the cloud