Bangalore,  March 20, 2014:  A big chunk of Microsoft's growth in India in the last 12 months has come from its cloud businesses, said Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, at the Windows Azure Conference  which opened here today.
 “Microsoft is powering the cloud transition in India with Windows Azure and a set of comprehensive offerings across private, hybrid and public clouds,” he said, adding: “We are gaining  over 2000 commercial cloud customers every month in India and these are customers across all industry sectors – banking, manufacturing, healthcare and media, and across large, mid-sized and small companie.”
Scalability, reduced costs, flexibility, business agility and speed in new service roll-out are some of the reasons enterprises in India are attracted to cloud services.  Microsoft is helping Indian organisations assess and transition to the cloud easily. Microsoft has 10,000 partners and engages with an  ecosystem of 1.6 million developers in the country.
“ We are in a mobile-first, cloud-first world and cloud is becoming an integral part of the IT infrastructure in Indian enterprises today,” said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, Microsoft India.
 In the last year, the company has grown the number of its cloud solution partners by 200%, has seen a 100% growth in the number of independent software vendor (ISV) applications on Windows Azure and helped 1700 start-ups adopt Windows Azure.
Microsoft is also partnering with academic institutions to create Microsoft Innovation Centers – of which 39 are now operational. The company has conducted 2000 training sessions for over 200,000 developers and IT professionals in the last year.
In a video message to the conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said: “Azure is a powerful platform for the entire Indian ecosystem of IT professionals, developers and start-ups to bring their applications to market worldwide. It helps Indian customers leapfrog to the cloud, and accrue significant cost savings. It provides a unique opportunity for our partners to scale their business.  I believe the opportunities ahead for India with the Azure cloud platform are tremendous.”