 "Satya Nadella, Surface Pro 4")
The first thing he did after landing in Mumbai on just a day's visit was to get over the jet lag by running five kms in the morning. The run must have worked wonders as the 48-year-old Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella had a jampacked day, starting with a long breakfast meeting with industry captains followed by another one with media. In between, he had a brief chat with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. As if that was not enough, the second half of the day was spent with Microsoft's corporate and government customers and another one with top executives of the three start-ups - Snapdeal, Paytm and Justdial - the three companies Microsoft has partnered with.
Speaking at the morning event, "Microsoft Future Unleashed", Microsoft announced new partnerships, products and programmes in an attempt to enhance productivity and enable its corporate and government customers to enter new areas.
Nadella said, "We have to realise our vision in a mobile-first, cloud-first world." Nadella was in India for Microsoft's Future Unleashed customer conference celebrating its 25th anniversary in the country. Nadella showcased the company's apps on mobile phones, which are integrated on its Office 365 cloud platform, to demonstrate how the company was focused on improving productivity for its users.
The company is also showing flexibility in creating apps to be made available on platforms such as Apple iOS and Android. The technology giant also announced it would launch the new Lumia 950 and 950 XL in December 2015 and the Surface Pro 4 in January 2016. The company, however, did not disclose pricing details of the devices for the Indian market. Nadella said the company was following a three-layered ambition: reinvention of productivity, intelligent cloud and personal computing. Microsoft has launched local cloud data centres in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai targeted at the government as well as large and small businesses.
Microsoft also announced partnerships with three Indian e-commerce start-ups, Snapdeal, Paytm and Justdial, to offer its services through their platforms. Paytm will integrate with Microsoft's personal assistant software Cortana to make users pay utility bills conveniently and will facilitate Microsoft device sales via its platform. In exchange, Paytm will use Office 365 for merchants' inventory and accounts.
Snapdeal and Justdial will use Microsoft's search engine Bing to enhance customer experience and in return will use cloud services from the technology major.
It also launched a special cloud initiative for start-ups aligned to smart cities. Nadella said Microsoft would provide financial assistance of Rs 80 lakh to start-ups that created smart solutions on its Azure cloud platform. Microsoft is also launching laptops with added features such as digital clipboard and facial recognition applications that will automatically allow users to log in to mail after face detection.
The company is already offering a host of software applications suited for mobile phones and is gearing up to create a software platform to build solutions based for the Internet of Things (IoT) and other connected services.
Hyderabad-born Nadella said, "Today we all use the computer as desktop or laptop, tomorrow you will have a computer on your wrist. So we want to create a new type of computing and new type of computers."
Nadella said his company was working on a world without passwords as face recognition and other biometrics might soon replace the way we access systems.
On cloud computing, he said the government was using cloud to deliver better education and sanitation. and Microsoft was targeting small businesses that are participating in the e-commerce revolution in India for its cloud offering.
