Infosys and Microsoft Expand Partnership to Accelerate Adoption of GenAI and Microsoft Azure, Globally

Infosys and Microsoft have expanded their strategic collaboration to accelerate customer adoption of Microsoft Cloud and Generative Al. This partnership aims to help joint customers realize the value of their technology investments and achiever tansformative outcomes.

Infosys was an early adopter of GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's Al-powered coding tool, which has significantly boosted coding efficiencies. This year in June, Infosys has launched a GitHub Center of Excellence (CoE) to offer enterprise AI innovation to customers worldwide.

With this expanded collaboration, Infosys has been chosen as a strategic supplier to support cloud and AI workloads for Microsoft's enterprise customers.

The Focus Areas of the collaboration spans key sectors like finance, healthcare, supply chain, and telecommunications.

In conjunction with Microsoft’s technology and its own industry-leading AI and Cloud suite of offerings, Infosys Topaz and Infosys Cobalt, as well as its AI-powered marketing suite Infosys Aster, the collaboration will help enhance customer experiences and drive the global adoption of enterprise AI.

The scope of this expanded collaboration will include:

• Financial Services – Infosys' domain expertise with Finacle, alongside Microsoft's advanced capabilities will enable financial institutions to engage, innovate, operate, and transform more efficiently.
• Healthcare – Infosys Helix, a next-gen healthcare payer platform built on Microsoft Azure, uses AI/ML automation to optimize patient outcomes, will provide access to care, and enhance constituent experiences, while streamlining processes and reducing costs.
• Supply Chain – This sector will see optimized processes and increased agility through the combined strengths of TradeEdge and Azure OpenAI service.
• Telecommunications – Microsoft's generative AI and Infosys Live Operations platforms will deliver enhanced connectivity and customer experiences.
• Infosys Energy Management Solution, coupled with Microsoft's commitment to sustainability, will accelerate the NetZero journey for customers.
• Customer service - Infosys Cortex, an AI-driven customer engagement platform, integrates Microsoft GenAI and Copilot to deliver specialized and individualized copilot assistance to every member of a customer service organization.

Many of these solutions will be available on Azure Marketplace, allowing customers to utilize their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), creating a mutually beneficial market proposition.

This expanded collaboration is expected to drive global adoption of enterprise AI and enhance customer experiences.

To recall, in July, Tech Mahindra also collaborated with Microsoft to modernize workplace experiences using Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Infosys and Microsoft are also focusing on sharing best practices for Responsible AI. Infosys is a key partner in The Microsoft Responsible AI Partner Initiative, contributing to the development of ethical AI guidelines through Infosys’ Responsible AI (RAI) Office. Skilling efforts are also part of the collaboration, ensuring that the workforce is equipped with the necessary expertise to support these initiatives.

NTT Launches Tsuzumi LLM through Microsoft Azure AI MaaS Offering

NTT DATA, a global digital business and IT services leader, recently launched Tsuzumi through the Microsoft Azure AI Models-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering. This development represents a significant milestone in their 25-year collaboration, dedicated to pioneering technological solutions that drive sustainability and innovation.

Tsuzumi is a Large Language Model (LLM) with robust capabilities in both Japanese and English. It's designed to address environmental and financial challenges typically associated with LLMs. By adjusting model size without compromising performance, Tsuzumi makes advanced AI technologies, including Generative AI, accessible to a wider range of users and applications. One of its key features is operational adaptability, allowing it to quickly adjust to specific use-case requirements and reduce service provisioning costs. Initially available in Japan on the Azure MaaS platform, plans are underway to expand Tsuzumi's availability to other regions.

Initially available in Japan on the Azure MaaS platform, plans are underway to expand Tsuzumi availability to other regions. Advancements also are planned in multimodality, which will further enhance Tsuzumi's sophisticated capabilities and ensure it meets the evolving needs of businesses across the globe.

Tsuzumi is available in two versions: an ultra-lightweight version with a parameter size of 600 million (0.6B) and a lightweight version with a parameter size of 7 billion (7B), which are 1/300 and 1/25th the size of Open AI's GPT-3's 175 billion (175B), respectively. The lightweight version is designed to perform high-speed inference on a single GPU, while the ultra-lightweight version can do so on a CPU. This design significantly reduces the costs required for training, inference, and tuning.

The word Tsuzumi is a Japanese hand drum with an hourglass-shaped body and two drum heads. The heads are taut and have cords that can be tightened or loosened to adjust the tension. The tsuzumi is used in Japanese traditional music, including Noh, Nagauta, geza, and folk music. Some types of tsuzumi include the ko-tsuzumi and the san-no-tsuzumi, which is played with a wooden stick.

"tsuzumi" is currently in the process of trademark application. Focusing on the processing performance of the Japanese language, it represents the expectation for language model technology that drives industrial development, similar to how the tsuzumi drum initiates the start of a Gagaku (ancient Japanese court music and dance) ensemble.

NTT DATA remains committed to continuous innovation, ensuring that Tsuzumi stays at the forefront of AI technology. Advancements are also planned in multimodality, further enhancing Tsuzumi's capabilities to meet evolving business needs globally.

The launch of Tsuzumi comes at time when Indian IT giant Tech Mahindra has also announced the launch of Indian languages focused LLM 'Project Indic' , starting with Hindi language and its dialects.

Microsoft Azure Powered Climate-Tech Startup Respirer Living Sciences to Provide Real Time Air Quality Levels Across 122 Indian Cities

Image ~ http://atmos.urbansciences.in/

Powered by Microsoft Azure, Respirer Living Sciences is simplifying air quality monitoring in India

Provides insights on critical air quality levels across 122 Indian cities

To help spread awareness about air quality, climate-tech startup Respirer Living Sciences has developed a dashboard that provides real-time access to air quality pollution data. Powered by Microsoft Azure, this dashboard data can be leveraged to devise solutions from citizens and policymakers to tackle air pollution.

With an objective to improve the quality of life for people, the team at Respirer evaluated several parameters and air quality stood out among them. The startup realized that people were keen to know about the air quality in their immediate surroundings. However, the cost of setting up air quality monitoring solutions was very high, which prompted Respirer to start developing affordable air quality monitoring platforms, using sensors and IoT. However, sensors sometimes malfunctioned and recorded unnecessary data and noise which sometimes led to inaccuracies.

To achieve complete accuracy in mentoring air quality data, Respirer collaborated with Microsoft Research (MSR) India’s Center for Societal Impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI). The startup is one of the four organizations in the program’s first cohort. MSR enabled them to integrate fault detection technology in their platform. Respirer platforms also use a technique called dependable IoT, developed by researchers at MSR, that monitors the health of IoT-based devices using a fingerprint of their battery’s performance.

Using machine learning and data visualization, Respirer built a dashboard, enabled by Power BI, to study data from 240 government air quality monitors as part of the National Clean Air Program tracker. The Power BI dashboard is able to run the data through Azure’s SQL servers, making the process fast and seamless. More importantly, it enables the Respirer team to execute all of this with a shorter turnaround time and with a small development team. It also enables government officials to check if any of their monitoring stations go offline and repair them in real time.

He's on a mission to enhance the quality of the air we breathe. Catch @rsutaria, Founder & CEO, @urbansciencesIN on the latest episode of #MicrosoftElevatedPitch, where he talks about how his #Startup is solving the pollution problem in the country. pic.twitter.com/hp5l6KP1Go

— Microsoft India (@MicrosoftIndia) August 18, 2021

Ronak Sutaria, Founder of Respirer Living Sciences said -

About 40 out of the 240 Continuous Air Quality Monitoring Stations set up by the government are in and around Delhi alone, which is why it’s no surprise that the city always leads in conversations around air pollution. Even in places where data exists, it’s stored in databases that not many track regularly or are not accessible to citizens. Scientific and accurate data in this space can provide meaningful insights and increase awareness about air quality across the country to enable greater involvement and action from citizens and policy makers.

The Respirer solution costs one-twentieth the price for installation of a regulatory air quality monitoring system. It provides easy access to data around historical trends and levels of different pollutants across individual cities on a yearly basis or during different times of the day. It also enables anyone to select different filters to get insights that are meaningful to them, thus eliminating the need for any data science knowledge.

Ronak added, "Typically, it would have taken us four to six months and a team of developers to pull out all the analytics and visualize that amount of data at these depths. But with Power BI, we were able to execute this project in just a little under four weeks with just one analytics engineer."

Respirer’s long-term vision is to create a network of low-cost air quality monitoring sensors to provide a wider scientific view of the air that India breathes. A reasonable analysis of air quality index in India will require a simplified collection of data across 4,000 to 8,000 locations in the country. The startup’s plan is to fill this gap with affordable air quality monitoring devices.

Around 1,000 Respirer devices have been used by housing societies, schools, industrial companies, and even government organizations for monitoring air quality in their locations. Respirer is working towards building a platform to make the data publicly available, across a unified platform, allowing delivery of hyper-local air quality data so citizens know the quality of air they are breathing at not just city level but even at a neighborhood level.

NIIT Technologies Introduces Microsoft Azure and AI-based Cognitive Service Desk Audit

NIIT Technologies Limited, a leading global IT solutions organization, announces the launch of a new cloud-based solution, Cognitive Service Desk Audit, built on Microsoft Azure platform. The solution will play a major role in enhancing the productivity of enterprises by increasing operational efficiency, reducing audit efforts and improving quality and vigilance.

Cognitive Service Desk Audit uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to define the tonality of the end user through text mining & analytics. The software also audits the staff’s voice and accent quality, resolution accuracy, and process adherence audit to provide quality output. Additionally, to minimize errors in understanding the end user party during the conversation, the solution also provides real time on-screen speech transcription of the online phone conversation.

Vamsi Rupakula, Global Head - IMS & Cloud at NIIT Technologies, stated, “We are dedicated towards boosting the client business by engaging at the intersect of deep domain expertise and emerging technologies. Our teams have designed the Cognitive Service Desk Audit on the Microsoft Azure platform to increase the productivity of the end user in the enterprise. The solution helps to minimize human errors, enhances quality, improves productivity, and delivers real-world business impact.”

Rajiv Sodhi, General Manager partner Ecosystem at Microsoft stated, “Microsoft AI based cognitive services are easy to integrate, and enable applications, websites and bots to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret user needs through natural methods of communication. Our collaboration with NIIT Technologies will enable businesses to add new capabilities to their audit process, and enhance customer engagement, using Microsoft’s AI platform and the trusted Microsoft Azure cloud.”

NIIT Technologies has taken the lead in implementing the solution and deployed it internally to further develop it from experience and make it better to benefit the clients.

NIIT Technologies has been a Microsoft Partner for nearly two decades. The two have jointly enabled large enterprises transform in a rapidly changing IT landscape. The Cognitive Service Desk Audit is another offering that has leveraged the Microsoft platform to aid the clients to seamlessly move their business applications to the cloud while managing and operating at scale.

Anil Kumble Founded Startup and Microsoft Launches AI, IoT Powered 'Smart' Cricket Bat

Former Indian national cricket team captain Anil Kumble founded technology startup, Spektacom Technologies, and Microsoft Corp have announced the introduction of the ‘Power Bat’, which provides players, coaches, commentators, fans and viewers with a new and unique way to engage with the sport and help improve their game — all powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform using AI and Internet of Things (IoT) services.

Microsoft has been working closely with Anil Kumble, who is an engineer by education, and his startup Spektacom to incubate and launch the product, as part of its ScaleUp program.

The 'Power Bat' carries a tiny sticker-chip, the size of a credit card and weighing less than 5 grams. The data from the sticker-chip will be fed into a stump box, and captured and processed using Microsoft’s Azure Sphere to be available to the broadcaster of the match real time and for the player to mull over later.

The data will help analyse shots and break them into measurable parameters such as quality (of the shot), swing (of the bat), power, and twist. It will help batsmen, to give an example, find out how often they hit the ball from the “sweet spot”.

Kumble’s start-up Spektacom Technologies has already experimented with the concept in the Tamil Nadu Premier League on a limited basis and is now ready to scale up through broadcast partner Star Sports.

The quality of the shot is calculated in percentages, the speed of bat in kmph, the power in specs while the twist happens in degrees. In a live demonstration of the bat’s abilities at a Star Sports studio in Mumbai on Thursday, data from a shot showed up on screens in a few seconds.



While the broadcaster would have access to this sticker initially for their commentators to then analyse a batsman during a match, the technology would later be available commercially for anyone to buy the sticker, download an app and access their data. Kumble added that the gadget—which charges in 90 minutes and lasts two days on it—would be affordable.



Star India, the leading cricket broadcaster in India, has used the technology successfully in recent series to provide real-time statistics and insights straight off the oval.

“We’re excited to be a part of the work Spektacom and Star India are doing to enhance the cricket experience for fans, players and coaches. We’ve already seen the impact that connected devices have had in other industries, and we believe that with the advancements in our AI and cloud services, this is just the beginning of what’s possible for not only cricket, but all sports,” said Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President, Microsoft.

Sanjay Gupta, Managing Director, Star India, said, “Star India has always strived to redefine and elevate experiences for sports fans. From Multi-language feeds and Select Dugout to VR and Watch n’ Play, the coverage of Vivo IPL demonstrates our commitment toward creating new benchmarks in how technology is deployed to deepen fan engagement. The Power Bat promises to be another step in the same direction, and we look forward to the partnership with Anil Kumble (Spektacom) and Microsoft in bringing it to our broadcasts.”



Kumble commented, “Our vision is to bring sports closer to fans through interesting ways of engagement using real-time sports analytics. At the same time, it is important that the technologies used are seamless and do not disrupt the game or obstruct the players. With Microsoft, we have been able to create a secure and effective solution, and with Star India, we have a partner that can stimulate and excite fan engagement.”

The Power Bat is a unique concept whereby a lightweight, Azure Sphere-powered sticker is stuck on the shoulder of the bat — a form factor that is completely unobtrusive. In a live match, as soon as the batsman hits the ball, data on different parameters (speed on impact, twist on impact and quality of the shot — percentage proximity of the ball’s contact to the sweet spot of the willow) are captured in a new unit of measurement titled Power Speks. Microsoft’s Azure Sphere ensures that the data is securely captured and processed. Using advanced analytics and AI services on Azure, real-time insights are captured through the stump box and displayed via the broadcaster. During practice or coaching, the same data can be viewed through a mobile app.

Although the technology introduced by Spektacom has its first use case in cricket, for Microsoft, Anil Kumble and Star India, this is the first of many sports where it can be used. Microsoft believes in leveraging its technology and its people to help sports teams and organisations solve their toughest challenges. By leveraging the company’s intelligent cloud and productivity solutions, sports organisations worldwide are connecting with fans, optimising team and player performance, and managing their operations in new, innovative ways.

Source - Express Computer, Livemint, Microsoft Blog

Flipkart Adopts Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform

While the cloud war is heating up by each passing day with key players like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google battling out to get a bigger piece of the pie, Microsoft with a recent deal might just have had gotten an upper hand.

Yesterday saw world tech giant Microsoft announcing a "strategic partnership” with India's Flipkart that will entail the ecommerce biggie adopting Microsoft’s much-famous Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Flipkart group CEO Binny Bansal announced the partnership at an event in Bengaluru. Initially, the collaboration will see Flipkart making use of Microsoft's Azure as its public cloud platform. This will end up serving as a major encouragement for Microsoft in the current battle-like environment building between world cloud players for Indian customers.

Answering the reason behind collaborating with the 2007 born online shopping portal Flipkart, Nadella said that Microsoft as an organisation aims to empower each and every Indian organisation with technology, and the key to making this possible is to forge partnerships with Indian companies like Flipkart.

Flipkart, which is often referred to as Amazon of India intentionally decided to stay away from Amazon's cloud services taking into consideration the tough competition between the two in India's ecommerce segement.

It is worth noting that Amazon opened its first data centre in India last year in June, while Google is expected to do the same by this year. According to experts, opening local server infrastructure in the Indian subcontinent can prove to be extremely beneficial for cloud service providers for several reasons, with the primary one being easy and faster transfer of data for customers based in India. In addition to this, local data centers also help in eliminating the increasing “data sovereignty” concerns, as data stored digitally is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located.

As far as Microsoft is concerned, the tech biggie has been serving the Indian businesses with its local data centers since two years now. Hence, this make it extremely important to note that Flipkart has recently been moving its data centers in-house. But Flipkart is quite optimistic that Azure will end up adding an extra “layer of advanced cloud technologies and analytics” to these data centers, including machine learning smarts and artificial intelligence (AI), which will further end up enabling the Indian ecommerce giant to tap into Cortana Intelligence Suite and Power BI to optimize its data for innovative merchandising, advertising, marketing and customer service.

India with its population of 1.3 billion people, most of whom still aren't online has emerged as an important battleground for major U.S. tech companies aiming to target the “next billion” internet users.

Speaking on the collaboration with Microsoft, Flipkart's Bansal said “Flipkart has always been committed to its vision of transforming commerce in India through technology." He further added, "Given Microsoft’s strong reputation in cloud computing, coupled with scale and reliability, this partnership allows us to leverage our combined strength and knowledge of technology, ecommerce and markets to make online shopping more relevant and enriching for customers.”

The deal is testimonial of the fact that the Indian subcontinent is now ripe for growth, which spells a golden period for both consumer-focused companies as well as the cloud-service partners these companies depend on.

Microsoft Launches Public Cloud Services From Local Data Centres In Chennai, Pune & Mumbai

Technology giant Microsoft's Tuesday launch event proved to be a good news for India. The company launched its public cloud services from local data centres yesterday and as a part of this new launch, the company will inaugurate its three data centres - Chennai, Pune and Mumbai - in the country, serving Central India, South India, and West India Azure cloud regions respectively, making Microsoft the first hyper-scale public cloud provider in India, Jason Zander, corporate VP for Microsoft Azure, wrote in a blog post.

The launch is aimed at aiding businesses and organisations to encourage inclusive growth and spur innovation.

The three new data centres are expected to start their operations after the facility is inaugurated by the respective chief ministers - J Jayalalithaa and Devendra Fadnavis.

According to Gartner, a market research firm, the public cloud market is expected to hit the $2 billion mark in another three years.

Speaking at the launch, Tyler Bryson, general manager, marketing and operations, Microsoft India, said, "More organisations and governments will adopt the public cloud which will open up more opportunities for Microsoft."

He further added, "Enterprise-grade performance, flexibility and hybrid capability, openness and trustworthiness are differentiating factors of the Microsoft cloud. In addition, comprehensive higher-level business services enable new business possibilities for customers."

A public cloud is basically based on the standard cloud computing model. Under this model, a service provider makes resources, such as storage and applications, available to the general public over the net.

Microsoft may make these Public cloud services available absolutely free or offer them to customers on a pay-per-usage model.

Microsoft to Invest Rs.1400 Crore In India Cloud Data Centers

Microsoft, the technology giant, has decided to spend Rs.1,400 crore on setting up three data centres in India. The US based software company took this step after it saw a $2 trillion promise in the country’s cloud market. According to a filing with the Registrar of Companies, the company has already started the work on setting up their cloud data centres in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune. The local centres are being setup by the technology giant with an aim of capturing the Indian market, especially customers having data sovereignty concerns in the telecom and banking centres.

The software giant was successful in earning a total sum of Rs. 2,261 crore from India in the financial year from 2013-2014. This has made India amongst the fastest growing cloud market for Microsoft with about 2,000 customers added each month. Microsoft is hoping to increase the scale of its cloud offerings by setting up more and more data centres all round the globe.

“The biggest cloud data centres we have globally are capable of handling 600,000 servers in just one region. That’s a massive amount of compute. Increasing this scale helps us in being more competitive”, said Azure Jason Zanders, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft in a statement to Economic Times.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer had announced that he saw the India cloud computing market as a $2 trillion market opportunity. He made this announcement during his visit to the country in September.

Many top cloud players have shown keen interest in the Indian market and are coming up to set up their cloud centres in the country. IBM successfully launched a centre this month in Mumbai and has future plans of setting up another one very soon. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had also indicated in September that the company might set up centres in India. This situation is quite different from what it was a year ago when most of the companies ignored India citing problems like patchy internet connection, infrastructural issues, unreliable optical fiber connectivity and unpredictable power supply etc.

“There is a huge demand for cloud services in India, especially among SMBs because of the companies like Microsoft are willing to spend so much on setting up data centres in India”, said Sanchit Gogia, Chief analyst, Greyhound Research in a statement to the Economic Times.

In order to ensure a more faster and reliable bandwidth, the software giant is in direct talks with telecom companies which will connect large enterprises directly to their data centres.

Microsoft to Invest Rs.1400 Crore In India Cloud Data Centers

Microsoft, the technology giant, has decided to spend Rs.1,400 crore on setting up three data centres in India. The US based software company took this step after it saw a $2 trillion promise in the country’s cloud market. According to a filing with the Registrar of Companies, the company has already started the work on setting up their cloud data centres in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune. The local centres are being setup by the technology giant with an aim of capturing the Indian market, especially customers having data sovereignty concerns in the telecom and banking centres.

The software giant was successful in earning a total sum of Rs. 2,261 crore from India in the financial year from 2013-2014. This has made India amongst the fastest growing cloud market for Microsoft with about 2,000 customers added each month. Microsoft is hoping to increase the scale of its cloud offerings by setting up more and more data centres all round the globe.

“The biggest cloud data centres we have globally are capable of handling 600,000 servers in just one region. That’s a massive amount of compute. Increasing this scale helps us in being more competitive”, said Azure Jason Zanders, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft in a statement to Economic Times.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer had announced that he saw the India cloud computing market as a $2 trillion market opportunity. He made this announcement during his visit to the country in September.

Many top cloud players have shown keen interest in the Indian market and are coming up to set up their cloud centres in the country. IBM successfully launched a centre this month in Mumbai and has future plans of setting up another one very soon. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had also indicated in September that the company might set up centres in India. This situation is quite different from what it was a year ago when most of the companies ignored India citing problems like patchy internet connection, infrastructural issues, unreliable optical fiber connectivity and unpredictable power supply etc.

“There is a huge demand for cloud services in India, especially among SMBs because of the companies like Microsoft are willing to spend so much on setting up data centres in India”, said Sanchit Gogia, Chief analyst, Greyhound Research in a statement to the Economic Times.

In order to ensure a more faster and reliable bandwidth, the software giant is in direct talks with telecom companies which will connect large enterprises directly to their data centres.

Microsoft to Set Up Cloud Data Centre in India

If all goes as planned, Microsoft will soon offer Azure and Office 365 - its commercial and cloud services from three new local data centres in India. Microsoft is planning to make these services available by the end of next year. This step by the tech giant will make it the first technology company to ever set up cloud data centres in India. According to experts, this move by Microsoft will have the US based company compete better in the local market.

“When we think about the cloud opportunity in India itself, it is going to be a $2 trillion opportunity,” said, Satya Nadella, Chief Executive, Microsoft in New Delhi on Tuesday. Nadella also added that this move by Microsoft will benefit and help entrepreneurs, Indian companies and government. Nadella did not disclose the investment amount involved in setting up the data centres but said they will have ‘sizeable’ capacity.

This announcement by Microsoft is quite important given the ruling party, BJP’s views about bringing local data centres to the country in order to maintain the data sovereignty. Besides this, a lot of Indian enterprises have long been hesitant and worried about hosting their data on public cloud because none of the major data players like Google, Microsoft or Amazon Web Service have their data centres in the country.

“I think in two or three years, when the servers come to India, the public cloud market will become more interesting because now there are some territorial issues in holding the data in the country,” said, Jagdish Belwal, CIO at Tata Motors in a recent interview given to Economic Times. Tata Motors makes use of Amazon Web Services.

According to Vishal Tripathi’s statement to Economic Times, Microsoft’s move to set up a local data centre will give the company “more muscle” to compete in the cloud services market and “Office 365 could see higher adoption”. Vishal Tripathi is a Principal research analyst at Gartner.

With players such as IBM spending millions on advertising its Softlayer cloud and Oracle trying hard in the Indian market by announcing several more new offerings, the competition in the cloud market has increased like never before.

Microsoft to Set Up Cloud Data Centre in India

If all goes as planned, Microsoft will soon offer Azure and Office 365 - its commercial and cloud services from three new local data centres in India. Microsoft is planning to make these services available by the end of next year. This step by the tech giant will make it the first technology company to ever set up cloud data centres in India. According to experts, this move by Microsoft will have the US based company compete better in the local market.

“When we think about the cloud opportunity in India itself, it is going to be a $2 trillion opportunity,” said, Satya Nadella, Chief Executive, Microsoft in New Delhi on Tuesday. Nadella also added that this move by Microsoft will benefit and help entrepreneurs, Indian companies and government. Nadella did not disclose the investment amount involved in setting up the data centres but said they will have ‘sizeable’ capacity.

This announcement by Microsoft is quite important given the ruling party, BJP’s views about bringing local data centres to the country in order to maintain the data sovereignty. Besides this, a lot of Indian enterprises have long been hesitant and worried about hosting their data on public cloud because none of the major data players like Google, Microsoft or Amazon Web Service have their data centres in the country.

“I think in two or three years, when the servers come to India, the public cloud market will become more interesting because now there are some territorial issues in holding the data in the country,” said, Jagdish Belwal, CIO at Tata Motors in a recent interview given to Economic Times. Tata Motors makes use of Amazon Web Services.

According to Vishal Tripathi’s statement to Economic Times, Microsoft’s move to set up a local data centre will give the company “more muscle” to compete in the cloud services market and “Office 365 could see higher adoption”. Vishal Tripathi is a Principal research analyst at Gartner.

With players such as IBM spending millions on advertising its Softlayer cloud and Oracle trying hard in the Indian market by announcing several more new offerings, the competition in the cloud market has increased like never before.