Microsoft ready to take 50m SMBs on Cloud

HARYANA: As over 50 million Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in India look to move to a secure Cloud, Microsoft — with its end-to-end offerings with New-Age capabilities — is set to help them evolve and adopt an “intelligent” Cloud, says Microsoft India President Anant Maheshwari (pictured).

Maheshwari, who believes that almost every company will eventually become a software one at some point of time with the fourth industrial revolution, an “intelligent” Cloud will chart their digital journey.

There are large enterprises that will have a dedicated infrastructure, teams and resources for Cloud adoption.

“And then, there is a large number of SMBs and in India, these SMBs could even tend to include many of our listed companies on our stock exchanges.

A study summarises that it is upwards of 50 million. I am not going to debate that number. Whether it is 45 or 55 million, I don’t think the strategies will change in terms of what you do to move on to Cloud,” Maheshwari said during a free-wheeling chat at Microsoft’s office here.

Microsoft globally, including in India, has been uniquely positioned and has done a lot of work over the last 40 years to build a massive partner eco-system that is serving SMBs.

“Microsoft has 64,000 Cloud partners globally and, just as a matter of perspective, that is more than the total number of partners the next three companies combined have. So that is the kind of strength that Microsoft has in terms of just partner collaboration,” Maheshwari said.

“In India, we have 9,000 partners and through them, we get to more than 250 cities,” he added.

According to a recent ASSOCHAM-Deloitte joint study, adoption of advanced business digital technologies can lead to increase in revenues by up to 27 per cent, increase in employment by up to 84 per cent, and enhanced access to international markets by up to 65 per cent for SMBs in India.