Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asked to bring cloud hosting to India

 

Large enterprise clients of Microsoft are delighted that an Indian is the new leader of the iconic company whose software products are ubiquitous across their organisations. 

At the same time, Chief Information Officers are also being realistic about what Satya Nadella's priorities might be, while hoping that the appointment will eventually bring some focus into the cloud computing needs of enterprises in India. 

"So far, Microsoft's cloud services are hosted overseas. If they host this India, it will be great news for Indian companies," said Anil Jaggia, CIO at HDFC Bank, India's second largest private sector bank. 

"Whether Nadella's coming will change things, it's too early to comment on that," Jaggia said. 

One expectation that's emerging, in common to the CIOs ET contacted, is that Nadella's two decades of experience focussed on corporate IT infrastructure and the related Microsoft software, will help them with 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," said Francis Rajan, information technology head at Bangalore International Airport.

At Mumbai-based conglomerate the Essar group, one of Microsoft's biggest Indian customers, chief technology officer Jayantha Prabhu said "while I expect him to focus on Microsoft customers worldwide being the CEO, I am sure he will have a greater focus on India which is one of two largest consumer-driven economies in the world." 

"With Microsoft being well entrenched in India due to its long history, I expect Satya to leverage the same and build on helping the Indian enterprise customers realize their potential," Prabhu added. 

Nadella, who was appointed on Tuesday, joined the ranks of other Indian-origin CEOs such as PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and Ajaypal Singh Banga, chief executive of MasterCard. 

Hyderabad-born, Manipal University-educated Nadella will be Microsoft's third CEO after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, ending a search that began in August last year. 

While India is not a large market for Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington based company has the largest centre of Microsoft IT engineering divisions in the country, with over 5,800 employees. 

While the CIOs wish Nadella well, some are sceptical that having an Indian-origin executive as CEO will make much difference to them. 

"It's great to have a CEO of Indian origin at Microsoft, but he's not going to change anything," said Parakh Dave, chief information officer and chief technology officer at Future Group. 

"There are several other Indian origin CEOs at other firms, so this just underlines the fact that there are many quality people from India out there.