Satya Nadella transforming Microsoft in a very big way: Anant Maheshwari

At Microsoft's Hyderabad campus, the tech giant's India president Anant Maheshwari turns a hardcore marketer. The US-based software firm is at the vanguard of driving digital transformation in India, with 70 of the top 100 BSE-listed companies now using its cloud services. Microsoft works with over 2 lakh large, medium and small enterprises, 29 state governments and over 5,000 start-ups in the country. "We are fueling innovation and accelerating India's digital transformation with our global and local cloud services. As many mobile-only and cloud-only collaboration and productivity scenarios emerge in the workplace, we are working with our customers and partners to accelerate the movement to 'Intelligent Cloud' and 'Intelligent Edge' in the next year, and to help build new engines of growth," Maheshwari tells Anto T Joseph.

How is the Satya Nadella factor helping your business in India?

I would say the Satya Nadella factor is helping Microsoft in a very big way as he has transformed a lot of the way we think about how we serve our customers and how we work with our partners, how we move from a know-it-all culture to a learn-it-all culture. The impact that the new leadership team at Microsoft has had on the culture is the biggest enabler for us for our long-term success. And that plays in India as much as it does in many other geographies of the world. It definitely helps to have a CEO who understands the deep areas of India's past and potential future.

Nearly 27 years after the inception in 1990, Microsoft in India has changed the way it handled partners starting July 1, 2017. What prompted you to bring in the 'One Commercial Partner'concept and what are the benefits you foresee?

We have always been focused on partners, but the partner capabilities in our organisation were embedded in different business units, which were still very customer oriented. We realised many of our partners are playing across different customer times based across several solution areas and also on different levels of capabilities. On their part, they are evolving their business models too. So, it is really responding to the market and the needs of the market, where we said we needed a very dedicated focus on partners. This is because many of our partners are also very global and they create capability in one geography, and then go and deliver that capability in other geographies of the world. And cloud becomes a huge enabler of that momentum for our partners, which may not have been possible five years back. With all of that playing out, it was time for us to rethink how we would go to the market, and that, I would say is the driver. The good part is that we had a good problem to solve. We already have the largest partner network in the world on the cloud. The benefits are very clear. There is an increased focus on our partners; the focus is also on independent software vendors, system integrators, advisories and the channels. The way we structure that is going to create a lot more value for our partners.

How do you serve two rivals in the market, for instance, Uber and Ola?

The good part about Microsoft is that we are a large company and we can maintain absolutely confident ways of working of our ecosystem and maintain the specific work and that we will do for any of our customers or partners. So while I wouldn't go specifically into the example you have quoted, this is very core to our thinking on customers. When one team works on a certain customer, it is going to make sure that the customer succeeds. If another part of Microsoft is working with a potential rival, absolutely. In any case, we live in an age of 'co-opetition' rather than competition.

What is the size of your total opportunity space?

If you look at all digital transformation opportunities, which include hardware, software, all digital transformation services that can come through, including all intelligent 'Edge' devices, and intelligent 'Cloud' capabilities, India has a potential of $107-billion market.

Microsoft has done a lot of innovations in India. How many of them do you expect to roll out in the market?

It is difficult to predict innovations in terms of commercial rollout. It is a continuous process.

There is a strong perception in the market that Microsoft is not so friendly towards operating in an open source environment. Are there any proactive steps you have taken to change the perception?

There is a continuous engagement with the community to change the perception. It is not just the open source, but multiple platforms, multiple capabilities.

How is the government's Digital India programme supporting your initiatives, especially when your mission is to empower every person and every organisation to achieve more?

We are very enthusiastic about and supportive of what the government is doing. For a company like ours, it is a great opportunity to be able to solve fundamental core issues of a big geography like India. So we are partnering on education, healthcare, agriculture, skilling and jobs - all of these core problems that India is trying to solve for its citizens. We are there. In addition, in e-governance and smart cities, we are doing a lot of work. As the government creates new infrastructure for the country, whether it is the infrastructure for goods and services tax (GST), the public cloud goes a long way in enabling them. So we are supporting the government in all their new initiatives and working with them.

There are lots of doomsday predictions in the IT job market. What is your take?

Nasscom has recently done a report with their assessment and projections. I am a member of Nasscom executive council. To me, that is the best source of information on the future job market.

Several governments are having problems with data sharing and do not want to engage with data centres set up abroad. How do you tackle this issue?

Microsoft has three data centres in India. They are actually serving many customers globally andthose customers are using the India data centres in their networks. In India, we have amongst us the largest export sector -- IT services. The entire sector is moving towards data. So if we try to close the doors too tight, we should remember that we may be able to prevent stuff from going out, but we will also prevent stuff from coming in, into the country. If you are a very large export economy, we have to be extremely careful about how we structure those relationships. So I am very encouraged by the latest policy paper that the government has released on the data laws – and looking at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a core tenet in framing the laws, I think it is a great move and progressive one by the government, to link to the standard of data privacy and security and privacy already among the best in the world. So having that consistency with GDPR will only help us as a country.

Going forward, how exciting is Microsoft's journey in India?

I just leave the tenet of learning every day in this journey because it is such an exciting place to be. I wake up every morning to say there will be few things I don't know today, but by the end of the day, I will know them. So that to me keeps me going.