Microsoft’s decision to name India-born Satya Nadella its new CEO has made the country’s enterprise clients very happy. Back here in India, the new appointment is expected to boost Microsoft India’s already-strong enterprises of business and research.
At the same time, though the investors realize that this won’t drastically change the dynamics, but they do expect some of their needs to be fulfilled. “Whether Nadella’s coming will change things, it’s too early to comment on that”, says Anil Jaggia, CIO at HDFC Bank, India’s second largest private sector bank.
Microsoft could consider hosting its web services in India too. “So far, Microsoft’s cloud services are hosted overseas. If they host this [in] India, it will be great news for Indian companies”, Jaggia states.
Some believe Nadella’s past experience with Cloud will help them in their cloud computing initiatives. “I reckon Nadella would bring in greater focus into Microsoft’s road-map on mobility and cloud computing. He could also play a role in Microsoft’s journey in terms of restructuring and the Azure (cloud) platform”, says Francis Rajan, Information Technology head at Bangalore International Airport.
But there are people who doubt if the appointment will change anything. Parakh Dave, Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Future Group, said, “it’s great to have a CEO of Indian origin at Microsoft, but he’s not going to change anything”.
So does Nadella have any special plans for India? We don’t know yet, but what we do know is that India registered a growth of 13% in the fiscal year of 2013. In the same time, Microsoft’s Enterprise Partner Group added over 15,000 Azure customers, which yielded a growth of a whopping 250%.