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dIGITal ENTErPrISE | TALkING POINT

Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India, talks about how their

new five-pronged strategy is making cloud and digital transformation
solutions popular from SMBs to enterprises. Excerpts.

MICROSOFT CLOUD IS THE

LARGEST CLOUD GLOBALLY

Now that it has been over a year since you took charge erment. The fifth one is our SMB market strategy, that
of Microsoft in India, what are the most important is something very unique to India. For the SMBs our
focus areas for you as the leader ? plan is focused around specific solutions for them, and
If you look at the overall transition that Microsoft had in also the broadband revolution India is witnessing where,
the last 3 years globally, that is getting reflected in India for instance a small unit can access our solutions on
too. the cloud and pay per use. The entire combination of
But India obviously has its own opportunities that I GST, digital payments, access to broadband, and cloud
am excited about. The first is the digital transformation, based solutions has come at a great time, and creating
where from a products and solutions approach we have newer and newer opportunities.
moved to become digital transformation solution provid-
ers for our customers and partners. And how the intel- What will be special or different in the way you handle
ligent cloud and the intelligent edge strategy is bringing the 6 vertical that Microsoft will have special focus on?
big differences is another exciting story. But this whole The first is the expertise and the breadth of solutions.
digital transformation mindset changes the DNA of the Though intelligent cloud and intelligent edge have
company. The second key area for us is our strategy become buzzwords and everybody is offering that today,
to address the important verticals with sharper focus. Microsoft’s position is different. With Azure, Office 365,
We have identified some including BFSI, manufacturing, and Dynamics 365 clouds we are offering infrastructure
retail, Government, healthcare, education. And special- as a service, software as a service, platform as a service
ly for India, we are also focus on IT/ITeS, unicons, and today, while others are still trying to put that end to end
start-ups. So its a global strategy with an India flavor. ecosystem and infrastructure together. The second
The third big focus for us here is Digital India, where the big difference is because of our partnership strategy,
key pieces are healthcare, education, agriculture, skill- specially the ISV strategy where we are partnering with
ing and jobs. software players and bringing their solutions on our
These are typical problems of a large and growing clouds so that the burden of technology and costs is not
country like India the Government wants to address, passed on to the customer. For instance, with Adobe
and we are now fully aligned with that. The fourth thing we are working together by linking our solutions for
we are doing in terms of our partners. We have carved the customer, wherein Adobe products and Azure or
out all our partner resources in different parts of the Dynamics work together for the customer. Adobe is just
company, and created a commercial partner organi- one example, but we have worked out a huge global
zation which is just focused on success for our part- level ISV ecosystem with leading software players in
ners and how the partners can ensure the success of most areas. So its like the best of both worlds for the
the customers. While we have one of the worlds larg- customers. We have more than 9000 partners in India,
est partner eco-systems, for digital transformation you much bigger that any of our competitors; and globally
need partners who understand what digital is all about. our partner ecosystem is bigger than several our our
That is why special focus on partner skills and empow- competitors put together.

| A CyberMedia Publication www.dqindia.com January, 2018 | 35