Microsoft's cloud vision has TCS, Infosys, Wipro in it

It has been barely six months since Microsoft came to India with its Azure Cloud platform, but going by the enthusiasm of its chief executive Steve Ballmer, it likes what it found.

In 'SI Country', Ballmer seems to have hit upon the huge manpower and developer community required to take its dreams to cloud nine. Indeed, according to Microsoft and Ballmer's vision, cloud computing will open as many new doors for the Indian IT engineers and firms even as it closes a few.

"According to a survey by an associate, cloud computing has the potential to create 300,000 new jobs in the country over the next five years," Ballmer said, in India to attend Microsoft's ISV (independent software vendor or small product company) day.

Indian currently has around 1,000,000 people employed in IT software and services exports and cloud is seen as impacting many of them as their core function of deploying and managing on-premise software diminishes in a world where software is run on 'clouds' of computers on the Internet rather than a computer situated in the company.

Going by the initial sign ups, Microsoft has so far the biggest enrollment numbers of any cloud platform in the country, despite announcing a coherent cloud computing strategy only last year -- two years or more after Google and Amazon made their designs on the market well known.

Since its launch, it has gained 250 partners, including nearly all the top IT firms such as Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys and TCS, and has around 4,700 applications built on its cloud platform, termed Azure. Around 22,000 developers and students have been given the basic training on using the platform. Over the last six months, the company seems to have perfected its cloud strategy even as many companies still struggle to find their place in the new world. Similar to its place in the non-cloud world,  Microsoft wants to be the OS or the core operating software in the cloud world too.

Thus, in Microsoft's vision, there will be three categories of service providers in the cloud world -- the companies that own and operate the cloud infrastructure (TCS, Infosys) -- the companies that supply the core software used to create the cloud (Microsoft) -- and the pure application companies that write applications that run on clouds and supply them to the cloud operators.

Ballmer believes that contrary to the fear that cloud will put the Indian engineers out of work by eliminating huge chunks of software deployment and management tasks, it will open a more lucrative avenue for Indian software talent. Under the traditional model of selling software, firms have to physically reach out to prospective clients across the world, supply them with a copy of their software product, install it on their computers and show that it works.

With cloud, he points out, all that a software firm has to do is to write the software and put it on any of the big clouds, whether operated by Microsoft itself, or any of the other prospective operators like TCS and Infosys. Any prospective client and simply click on a button and test the application, without having to download or install it on their own computers. Being visible on the cloud 'marketplaces' solves the issue of marketing their product as well.

"With cloud, they get the chance to create software products that can be exported on a global basis. The chance for that to happen without quite the same need for a global infrastructure of sales and marketing people will be fantastic," he pointed out.

True to style, Ballmer did not forget to take potshots at his bete noire, Google, mocking the company for coming out with a me-too PC operating system in the era of cloud computing. Calling Google confused, Ballmer said, "They are the ones that decided they did not have a popular operating system. So they introduced two of them, but, for myself, I can't tell the difference between them," he said, referring to the Chrome and Android operating systems.