Satya Nadella highlights Microsoft's focus on mobile, cloud-first world in India visit

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his first press conference in India announced that the company’s commercial cloud services, which are Azure and Office 365, would be available from local data centres in India by the end of 2015. The press conference was clearly aimed at showing that Microsoft intends to focus on enterprise when it comes to the Indian market.

According to a press statement from the company Microsoft’s Cloud services in India have seen an 100% increase in revenue. The company says that with the local data centres organisations using its services will benefit fro, lower latency, geo redundancy and data sovereignty.

Geo redundancy allows that in case of a site or service failure,the data can be rerouted via another data centres. The presence of more than one data centre would allow Microsoft to do so in India. Lower latency would mean less lag.

The local data centre announcement is in keeping with Nadella’s and Microsofts’s focus on a mobile and cloud first world. Microsoft did not specify the umber of data centres it would be opening.

When asked about how he thought the cloud services would succeed in India, Nadella said that he was confident that the growing enterprise market in India would demand more and more cloud infrastructure and the Microsoft aims to provide that. “What’s going to really drive this is the 900-million end-points and they’re going to demand more and more cloud infrastructure and we want to have that cloud infrastructure,” he said.

On how he would define the company’s success in a mobile world, given that Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 hasn’t done too well in the smartphone, Nadella said the company wasn’t focussing just on numbers.

“We do not define our success in mobility by just looking at the share of one form factor. Today’s announcement is that we are the backend on the infrastructure for any mobile app, on iOS, Android or Windows. That I think is a huge step. So if you’re a developer writing an application, you want a cross-platform infrastructure, we’re the best choice,” he said.

“Next we have enterprise management capability. Any enterprise that wants to bring their own devices, we’ll make sure that they’re secure. Thirdly we have Office 365, which is the ubiquitous productivity suite, on all mobile exit-points. Then we come to our own Windows Phones and Tablets and I’m fairly confident about the progress we’re making with these devices,” he added.