Here are a few news headlines from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s visit to Bengaluru. Satya Nadella has only good things to say about Indian startups and Bengaluru.
On Feb. 20, the India-born Nadella was on his maiden visit to the city as Microsoft CEO. Among other things, he participated in a 30-minute fireside chat with Infosys co-founder and former CEO Nandan Nilekani. The event was attended by nearly 1,000 techies and academicians, including some of the country’s most prominent entrepreneurs like Flipkart co-founder and group CEO Binny Bansal and InMobi co-founder and CEO Naveen Tewari.
Satya Nadella – Credit Talking tech. (EPA/Jagadeesh NV)
On the sidelines, he met a bunch of young entrepreneurs and saw some products that Indian startups are building. An impressed Nadella made several observations.
From Quartz India
Also in the news
Microsoft Teams Up With Flipkart To Battle Amazon For India’s Cloud Services Market (Forbes)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is leaving no stone unturned in wooing startups in India to its cloud platform Azure. On Monday, the Redmond-headquartered tech giant announced that Flipkart, India’s e-commerce marketplace, will adopt Microsoft Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform.
Nadella, who is in his maiden visit to Bangalore as the CEO of Microsoft, is in talks with other startups as well to understand their technology needs. He’s pitching Azure cloud platform to users as the company looks to catch up with Amazon Web Services in India. Amazon started Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2003 after experiencing the need for cloud services first hand. In 2016 at an event in Bangalore, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, had said though Amazon was a technology company at heart it ventured into the services space with AWS without much fanfare. AWS opened its data centre in Mumbai last year and at that time had more than 75,000 Indian customers using its cloud service. While AWS dominates the cloud market in India, Microsoft Azure is a close second. Others players include Google which in September 2016 announced its plans to set up a Google Cloud Region in the country which is expected to go live this year. The public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38% in 2017 to total $1.81 billion, according to Gartner, an American research firm.
Satya Nadella enthused about India’s entrepreneurial spirit (moneycontrol)
India is probably one of the places in the world where the Entrepreneurial Energy is able to scale up, not just start, Microsoft’s India-born chief Satya Nadella said on Monday. He said the entrepreneurial energy in the country is “tremendous” and Microsoft is “enthused” about it. “Every time I come back to India, the thing that grabs you is the entrepreneurial spirit of the place. There are a whole bunch of startups doing really exciting work,” Nadella said. Center of entrepreneurial energy at least for us right now in India is all around our cloud. It is fantastic, the quality of the entrepreneurs, the ideas… the Indian market itself is huge, but also going beyond that, it is amazing to see (the growth)”, he said in response to Nilekani’s question regarding entrepreneurial energy in India.
Center of entrepreneurial energy at least for us right now in India is all around our cloud. It is fantastic, the quality of the entrepreneurs, the ideas… the Indian market itself is huge, but also going beyond that, it is amazing to see (the growth)”, he said in response to Nilekani’s question regarding entrepreneurial energy in India. Nadella kick-started his three-day visit to India here, where he participated in a discussion organised by Microsoft on cloud-first, mobile-first world along with Indian IT veteran Nandan Nilekani. Stating that India has some brands that have already well established, Nadella said there was a stunning cross-section of startups in the country.
