Microsoft, Jio Empowering Small Businesses in India: Nadella

Microsoft is empowering small businesses in India in their Cloud journey with Reliance Jio, the company's CEO Satya Nadella has said.

Reliance Industries (RIL) in August announced partnership of its subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm with Microsoft in the technology space, including creation on cloud solutions.

As per the partnership, Jio will leverage the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to develop innovative cloud solutions focused on the needs of Indian businesses.

"Organisations today need a distributed computing fabric to meet their real world operational sovereignty and regulatory needs," Nadella said during the company's earnings call after posting $33.1 billion in revenue with $10.7 billion in net income (an increase of 21 percent) for its first quarter of fiscal year 2020.

"In India, we're bringing the power of Microsoft Cloud to millions of small businesses through our partnership with Jio, one of the largest mobile carriers in the country," Nadella added.

According to Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries (RIL), by working together to develop innovative and affordable cloud-enabled digital solutions built around Jio's world-class digital infrastructure and Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, "we will accelerate the digitization of the Indian economy and make Indian businesses globally competitive".

Jio will set up data centres in locations across India, consisting of next-generation compute, storage and networking capabilities, and Microsoft will deploy its Azure platform in these data centres to support Jio's offerings.

The initial two data centres, which can house IT equipment consuming up to 7.5 MW of power, are being set up in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. These are targeted to be fully operational in 2020.

"Every Fortune 500 customer today is on a cloud migration journey, and we are making it faster and easier," said Nadella.

Due to the solutions developed by Jio through the Microsoft Azure platform, Indian start-ups will have access to efficient and affordable cloud infrastructure and platform services, enabling them to develop innovative products and services faster and more cost-effectively.

Small and medium businesses in India also will have access to a range of cloud-based productivity, collaboration and business applications including Office 365, enabling them to compete more effectively in the Indian marketplace, the company said.

The Microsoft CEO said the company is re-imagining customers' data estates with the cloud era with new limitless capabilities.

"Azure AI now has more than 20,000 customers, and more than 85 percent of the Fortune 100 companies are using Azure AI in the last 12 months," he informed.