BENGALURU: On a day the US President, Donald Trump, made his maiden visit to India, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani have made strong references to their recently announced Azure cloud tie-up. At the Future Decoded CEO Summit in Mumbai, Ambani in fact said that the partnership between Microsoft and Reliance Jio will define this decade. Nadella, in turn, said the tie-up will enable Reliance, which has businesses across various sectors, use Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to build more technology.
Under the partnership, Reliance Jio will set up data centres throughout India, which will leverage the Microsoft Azure cloud services. Start-ups and small and medium enterprises too can avail access to latest Microsoft tech services by logging into the Reliance Jio portal. “As we are speaking, US President Donald Trump has arrived in Ahmedabad. The India that he will see in 2020 is very different from the India that either President Jimmy Carter saw or President Bill Clinton saw when they came … or (for that matter) even President Barack Obama,” Ambani said.
The enormous change has been made possible by the unprecedented digital revolution in the country, he added. Ambani said that while India has the opportunity to become the premier digital society in the world, it would be through harnessing entrepreneurial power at the grass-root level and empowering them with the adequate technological tools. “…And our (Jio’s) opportunity with Microsoft is to really give them full service to make sure that they are fully enabled with the tool sets, the data sets, because a mindset exists to really propel India forward, and that is even a bigger opportunity than the consumer piece that we have seen in the last few years,” Ambani said.
Nadella, earlier said during the summit, said that Indian businesses need to adapt to the latest technological advances. He pointed out that the past decade saw only the aggregators making the most of the technology tools in India and that time is ripe now to look for more productivity gains.