Speech of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on commercial cloud services – Azure and Office 365
It’s such a pleasure and a privilege to be here this morning. Quite honestly, it has been a couple of days in India and the energy, the optimism, the entrepreneurial spirit I see all around is just palpable. It’s pretty amazing, and for me personally it’s just rewarding to see it. Today we have a big announcement of our own, which will hopefully add to that optimism, that confidence and that energy in a pretty major way.
One of the things I wanted to start with is with some broader context. I think in India, at the end of the day, what is going to drive the country forward is the ingenuity of the people of India and how technology can be an enabler. We are fully committed to bringing the best technology to help in that process. The technological shift that we are going through right now is a pretty major one. I would describe this as a shift to a mobile-first, cloud-first world. And, when I talk about mobile-first it is not about one device and its applications. It is really the mobility of the human being across the entirety of their life. They get up in the morning, they check their device. They go into their office, they are on their PC. They go into a conference room, they have large screens. There are sensors in conference rooms, there are sensors in living rooms. All of these will require rich mobile experiences that delight human beings as they go through their day.
Now that richness of experiences, that personalization of that experience, the intelligence of that experience, comes because of the rich cloud infrastructure. In other words there is going to be no mobile-first world, without having a cloud-first world. And to me, that’s why describing the paradigm that we are entering as a mobile-first, cloud-first is the best way to describe the real technological shift.
The question that needs to be asked and answered is, what is Microsoft’s unique contribution to this mobile-first, cloud-first world? There are two things that are core to our DNA that is the sensibility that we at Microsoft have deeply. The first is around productivity. It is our mission to reinvent productivity so that every individual can get more out of their life and their time. This starts with things like Cortana, which is the intelligent agent on our phones which knows how we reason about all your information. To help you with your reminders, help you with your work schedules, help you with your documents. That’s the richness of personalization that we want to bring, the productivity that we want to bring the individual. But we don’t stop there, we go from individuals to groups, families and entire business processes in organizations. That’s our definition of reinventing productivity.
The other sensibility that Microsoft has that we want to bring forth is platforms. In fact, right here in India, every time we make some success, for every a dollar of revenue, there is ten dollars of revenue that gets created for our partners in this economy. That is at the core of what we have done everywhere. We bring together and harmonize the disparate interests of developers, end users and IT professionals. That ability to bring together these interests is what creates the magic of platforms. That is what we are doing now with our cloud platforms, as well as our device platforms.
But today, the exciting thing that I want to talk about is our cloud platform. When you think about the cloud opportunity in India itself, it is going to be a two trillion dollar opportunity. Just as in the case of mobile devices, India was able to leapfrog with the adoption of mobile devices. I believe that the cloud infrastructure, especially world-class cloud infrastructure, is going to help Indian companies, Indian Government and every Indian entrepreneur, to be able to really revitalize the productivity of this economy.
There are already big examples of Indian companies taking advantage of the cloud infrastructure. In fact, I had a chance to get to know some of these use cases; Fortis healthcare was able to fundamentally change the delivery of healthcare, as well as their cost savings by using our cloud. We’ve seen HCL take advantage of our cloud, as well as Bajaj Finance. These are three simple examples of the early days of traction we have in the Indian marketplace with our cloud. In fact, last year we grew our cloud business by over a 100 percent and we are very excited about that progress.
Going by that success, the announcement today I want to make is that we are going to make our commercial cloud services available from local datacenters. This is a major step for us and it fits with our world view, which is that distributed computing will remain distributed, and people like us who have global infrastructure, are going to take that global infrastructure and make it available in every country. And we want to start here with India, and make our services available on local datacenters.
So, this means we will have Azure, which is our cloud infrastructure service. As well as our Office 365 service, which brings together all of our productivity and collaboration capability to the Indian market, operated out of Indian datacenters.
We have over 10,000 partners who work with us. And by doing this, we have now opened up a huge opportunity for those 10,000 partners to be able to take these world-class services and make them available, broadly touching every walk of life, every vertical industry.
In the broader context, there are over 900 million users of cellphones. There are 250 million users of mobile devices, in other words internet connected phones, and that’s only going to grow. The one thing that you can be sure of is that for every connected smartphone you need to have cloud infrastructure that is hosting the applications, the data and the intelligence. And what we have done today is said that we want to be a leader in providing a cloud for every Indian, and every Indian application and developer. That’s what today’s announcement is all about; is to put a stake in the ground that we want to enable this burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit of India, to be able to create the indigenized experiences that power all the mobile endpoints that only are going to grow in both variety and form.
I could not be more excited in launching this initiative, launching this product offering here today. I think that this is the beginning of a new chapter for us wherein we bring some of the core capabilities that we have in the creation of platforms, and now bring it to a mobile-first, cloud-first era.
So thank you very much for coming here and participating in this announcement.
