Small and medium businesses are the force drivers of the Indian economy and require agile, flexible and scalable infrastructure to help manage their costs well, says Karan Bajwa, managing director, Microsoft India. “We have witnessed high-volume transactions in the SMB segment and this is largely due to the fact that they don’t have legacy on-premise systems that require migration to the cloud,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary. Excerpts:

How has the cloud business been for Microsoft in India?
Microsoft has been one of the earliest players providing cloud services worldwide. Offerings like Hotmail have been in service for more than a decade and a half. Microsoft is also a pioneer in providing commercial cloud services across all forms of cloud—private, public and hybrid. We not only enable and support easy transition to the cloud but also enable quick and strong integration with existing infrastructure of businesses, thus protecting their investments. We have witnessed triple digit growth in our cloud business in India which is in line with our global cloud performance. During the July-September quarter 2014, we registered a 128% growth in commercial cloud sales, and the sales of services based on our Azure cloud platform rose 121%, worldwide.

Owing to the evolving cloud market in India, we recently announced that we will be providing Azure and Office 365 cloud services from local datacentres in India by the end of 2015. This move will open opportunities for organisations across government, state-owned entities and banking and financial services, to name a few, to adopt the cloud.

Who is adopting cloud solutions in India—large enterprises, SMBs, or a mix of the two?
We have witnessed high-volume transactions in the SMB segment. For them it is more cost-effective to run operations on a public cloud. Similarly, we have seen large enterprises opting for a ‘hybrid’ model, in which they continue using their legacy IT systems while adopting the cloud for capacity expansions or building new apps.

What are the benefits for customers from the Microsoft cloud?
Microsoft offers a comprehensive stack of on-premise and cloud offerings which integrate strongly with each other and are built on the principle of ‘openness’ to work seamlessly with third party solutions and platforms. This offers businesses the flexibility of choosing their particular strategy and mix of cloud for their organisation. Businesses may choose some of their infrastructure to remain on-premise while moving a majority of it to the cloud or the other way round. They can also change this mix at any point of time to adopt more or less of cloud.

Azure, the Microsoft cloud platform, is a growing collection of integrated services—computing, storage, data, networking, and application—that is helping companies migrate faster to the cloud. With Azure, we provide greater flexibility, choices and services than any other cloud provider. Office 365 is the most-loved and used productivity offering in the cloud.  It is also the fastest growing business in the history of Microsoft.

What is the outlook for cloud business in general and the Microsoft cloud business in particular in India this year? What are the plans for promoting cloud business here?
Various analyst firms have projected a strong growth for cloud computing in India. We will be offering Azure and Office 365 services from local datacentres by the end of 2015 in India. In addition, we are seeing an increasing adoption of cloud by businesses of all sizes. However, we are particularly excited by the number of SMBs moving to the cloud. An overwhelming percentage of SMBs in India are not using any form of technology. Cloud has the potential of changing that fast.

The availability of Azure and Office 365 through the Open Licensing Program enables our partners to participate directly in the deployment of cloud services across the country.

In 2015, we see cybersecurity, Internet of Things and Machine Learning becoming drivers of technology-led innovation in the country.