You’ve heard of Star Wars; now get ready for cloud wars! As IT giants like IBM & Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS) clamour to corner a larger share of India’s fast growing cloud market, the rising competition is leading to the evolution of aggressive business strategies, including price cuts reports CNBC-TV18’s Rukmini Rao and Kritika Saxena.
With 3 local data centers in the country, and 50 of the top 100 BSE companies as its clients, cloud services are top priority for Microsoft in India. With a USD 15 billion global outlay for its data centers, Microsoft is addressing the Indian cloud market with a greater than ever vigor.
Joseph Sirosh, Corp VP- Datagroup, Microsoft, said: “In the Indian market we are serving our customers both on premises and cloud, with products like SQL server 2016 that was just released. Our customers here are experiencing the benefits of both data bases both on premises with intelligence integrated into all these things we have in MS really carved out a unique advantage in platform and makes it very easy for companies to build ultra sophisticated solutions.”
According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in India is set to grow at over 30 percent this year potentially crossing USD 1.2 billion in value. Within the cloud space, infrastructure services are likely to grow at 32.5 percent while platform services are projected to grow at 31.7 percent.
Beginning of this year also saw a global price war in the cloud spac. In January AWS did its 51st price cut with 5 percent reduction on c4 and m4 instances and just days after that Microsoft Azure announced a reduction of up to 17 percent on the Azure D Series virtual machines. Though these price cuts did not include India market, things will be changing soon.
Dinesh Goel, Partner, ISG India said: “As he demand for cloud increases and becomes more pervasive , the competitive intensity will increase , which will automatically reflect in greater price cuts. With local data centers - Microsoft already has 3, AWS has just set up one in June that will increase adoption and lead to price reductions.”
Industry experts say, while AWS is seeing a greater traction with the startup economy with the likes of Flipkart and Ola adopting its cloud service, Microsoft is banking on old relationships with its enterprise client s to grow its share of the cloud pie in India.
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