Cloud Revenue Is Now 50 Percent Of Microsoft India Revenue

Microsoft India president Anant Maheshwari said more than half of the company’s revenue in India now comes from the cloud and cloud-based services, signaling the rapid strides it is making in a market where Amazon’s AWS and Google are fierce competitors.

“In our book of business in India, cloud is no longer a minority. This is the year it is turning out to be a majority. It’s tipping the 50 percent mark,” said Maheshwari.

Microsoft India clocked Rs 6300 crore revenue in the 2017-18, a 12 percent drop over the previous fiscal. Its software solutions revenue was flat at Rs 5800 crore. When asked about the reasons for the softness in this segment, Maheshwari said, “The best metric to understand how India is functioning today is to look at global numbers. It’s a good representation of each other. That sets the baseline,” he said.

Microsoft globally has been performing very well. The company’s market cap is now higher than Apple’s, and is just a shade below Amazon’s. Much of that is being driven by CEO Satya Nadella’s focus on the cloud, its Azure platform in particular.

Asked how the Indian government’s data localization policy would impact companies, Maheshwari said he does not anticipate any serious issues. He said there’s good clarity emerging on the subject from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity). He said only an extremely small part of data is expected to be stored locally exclusively (without even mirroring that data elsewhere in a global public cloud). For the vast majority of data, including most of the corporate data, Maheshwari said Meity only expects clarity about where it is being stored or how to get access to it if required. He said data localization will not impede the process of running, say, AI applications on the data to obtain global insights.

Microsoft India has among its customers 97 percent of the top banks, 75 percent of the top retailers, 81 percent of the top auto firms, 75 percent of the top pharma players and 67 percent of the top healthcare firms. Maheshwari said there are very powerful platforms and services now available to do tech at scales – such as the intelligent cloud platforms and AI engines – and customers should use those in combination with their domain-specific data and expertise to build innovative solutions and stand apart from the rest. On Wednesday, at a media and analyst meeting, several of Microsoft’s customers, including Future Generali, Wipro, Apollo, and Public Financial Management System, demonstrated various applications they had built – in areas like employee empowerment, customer engagement, operations optimization and product transformation.

Maheshwari, like his boss Satya Nadella, is particularly focused on democratizing AI, making it accessible for all. “A tectonic shift is happening in AI. Nearly 85% of enterprises globally will use AI in some form or the other by 2020. Indian firms are now fast catching up,” he said.—Virtual machine