Satya Nadella in India: The country at the center of Microsoft's cloud ambitions

This is Microsoft Chief Satya Nadella’s third visit to India in recent times. His visit follows a string of high profile tech CEO visits to India , including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella repeated the major beats from the Microsoft Build 2016 developer conference, at the “Tech for Good, Ideas for India"event. The event was to showcase Microsoft’s latest capabilities for students, developers and entrepreneurs. Making the right statements, Satya Nadella expressed his thoughts on the company’s focus on India to ’empower every citizen and organisation so that they can perform better than their potential and achieve more for themselves and the country’. “Every time I come here, I go back energised. Its infectious to see the creativity here. It’s important to dream big and create big,” Nadella told the media, after a meeting with Microsoft developers, and entrepreneurs and students. Speaking on the sudden surge of top tech heads visiting the country Tarun Pathak, Senior Analyst at Counterpoint Research tells Tech2, “India is home to one of the largest userbase in the world which is yet to experience Internet connectivity. In such a scenario tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft are aligning their strategies to pitch their innovative offering to bridge this digital gap. Apart from this these tech companies know that connecting the next billion also means tapping the next billion dollar opportunity.” While bots and augmented reality is the bigger picture for Microsoft, we ask Pathak what the tech giant’s India agenda will be. “India being a mobile first country also holds a center stage in Microsoft’s cloud segment ambitions. Microsoft’s cloud business has been getting a steady traction in India in recent quarters is expected to grow in coming years, a sector which will be more than a billion dollar segment in a couple of years,” speculates Pathak. At his speech at the Microsoft event, Satya Nadella showcased conversation as a platform. He re-iterated the emergence of conversational assistants as the applications of tomorrow. The keynote speech did not have the demonstrations of actually booking a hotel room, ordering a pizza or booking plane flights, but Nadella gave these as examples of what could be done. A short video was shown, displaying the future probably uses of conversational chatboxes, instead of a series of demonstrations by various Microsoft representatives. Nadella stressed on how natural language communications with machines would totally change human machine interaction, and how we are at the start of this major shift. Another focus was on augmented reality and what kind of applications Microsoft HoloLens could do. One of the examples given was staff at NASA being able to go around and study a rover on mars from all angles because it was possible with the use of holograms. Nadella said the course of implementation of augmented reality technology and holograms, there will be major changes in architecture and industrial design to accommodate these new applications. With inputs from IANS