Microsoft empowers customers through local cloud, new cloud partnerships

Leading banks, financial institutions, hospitals, media companies, e-commerce organizations, government departments, and telecom providers have become early adopters of local Microsoft cloud services that were launched four weeks ago.

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud & Enterprise Group at Microsoft shared this information in Mumbai during his keynote on the second day of Future Unleashed, Microsoft’s largest ever customer conference in India.

Local Microsoft cloud services adoption has also been fueled by new partnerships with leading system integrators (SIs), new-age independent software vendors(ISVs), content companies, application developers and OEMs. Businesses of all sizes and across diverse industries are leveraging thelocal cloud for better productivity and enhanced customer experience.

Scott Guthrie said, “As the first hyper scale public cloud provider to offer services from datacenters in India, we are excited to see the rapid growth in usage driven by the digital innovation of our customers and partners.  Customers, especially those in financial services and Government, are keen on the local cloud, to drive productivity and customer and citizen delight.”

“Our partners are excited about new opportunities the cloud presents for themselves and their customers,” he added.

Leading banks and financial institutions have adopted Office 365 to redefine productivity and enable quick decision making while reducing IT infrastructure costs.  Notable names includeIDFC and ICICI Lombard.Kotak Mahindra Bank’s payroll processing, portfolio analytics and HDFC Bank’s customer experience analytics have also moved to the Microsoft cloud through ISV solutions hosted on local cloud.

Dipak Gupta, Joint Managing Director, Kotak Mahindra Bank said,"At Kotak, we are on a journey to provide stakeholders, both internal and external, the best of experiences as they engage with us.  Information technology and digital transformation will play a key role in enabling this. With our payroll partner ZingHR moving our data to Microsoft Azure services offered from the local datacenter, our employees will now be able to access their information quickly on a device of their choice from wherever they are.  The time taken for periodic processing will also reduce significantly along with benefits of reduced costs and improved compliance."

“ICICI Lombard is extremely focused on driving innovative solutions with a customer-centric approach.

The Cloud plays an important role in making services scalable, reliable and highly available within and outside the enterprise. We are already using Azure for our pre-production software lifecycle development processes for more than a year now. With Office 365, every employee in our organization will have the ability to collaborate efficiently by sharing best practices and innovative ideas. As our employees are geographically spread, it is important for us to give them a connected employee experience and we expect Office 365 to enable us in this mission. We are happy to see that Microsoft’s cloud services are now available from India and this will help us in moving more of our business processes to the cloud,” said Girish Nayak, Chief – Customer Service, Operations and Technology, ICICI Lombard GIC Ltd.

Similarly, leading hospitalssuch as All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Fortis have adopted Microsoft local cloud services.  In fact, Fortis has retired its datacenters and moved crucial applications for patient care to Microsoft Azure.