India is the best suited for PaaS, says Microsoft

By Manu Sharma, Apr 14, 2010 1759 hrs IST

In a bid to consolidate itself in the cloud space, Microsoft India has launched Windows Azure platform for end-to-end offering to customers, partners and developers. With Azure available as PaaS (Platform as a Service), Microsoft plans to increase the number of applications by three times over the next six months in India.

According to Microsoft, India is the best suited for PaaS offering than any other country in the world. Microsoft India has 4400 applications built on Windows Azure platform since February 2010.


Talking to CXOtoday at Microsoft Tech.ed 2010, Kattayil Rajinish Menon, MBS & Azure Evangelism Lead, Microsoft India said, "With businesses looking to the cloud to bring higher efficiencies, it is natural for us to leverage our strength of the past 15 years in the cloud space. Our PaaS offering has been very successful and has leapfrogged ahead of other countries."

As per industry experts, out of the total 46,000 application of Microsoft Azure, about 4400 applications are from India i.e. 12-13 percent of the company's share across the globe. The company reaches out to companies through its partners, ISV, SI and VAR across the country.

Menon said Wipro Technologies a partner started building applications on the Windows Azure platform to provide customers with dynamically scalable, high-performance applications on a pay-as-you-go basis. By taking advantage of the on-demand application scaling, Wipro expects to reduce costs, improve agility, enhance global consistency for its customers, and add new revenue streams for its own operations.

Similarly HCL Technologies to record the carbon credits of a company created a dash board management tool hosted on the cloud. Infosys set up a dealer management solution to track the stock available and maintain inventory again built on a Windows Azure platform.

Likewise, Wipro created a vendor portal hosted on Windows Azure platform to manage vendor details like procurement for their clients in the manufacturing and retail industry.

"We ran the beta PaaS for one year before officially launched it in India in February 2010 and have very little competition in this space since even Amazon offers IaaS and not PaaS," said Menon.

Microsoft has 8 centres where the data centres are located especially for the Azure customers and this includes even the disaster recovery sites as well. "We don't have no data centres for Azure customers in India but likely to add over the years," adds Menon.

Source: http://www.cxotoday.com/News/IT/ITeS/Networking_&_Communication/India_is_the_best_suited_for_PaaS_says_Microsoft/551-110554-20871.html

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