Microsoft Forges Cloud Partnership With Flipkart To Take On Amazon’s AWS

Expect Flipkart 2.0 thanks to this partnership

While you were sitting at home, idly passing time, munching on something, watching your favourite show on Netflix, Microsoft and Flipkart cracked a significant, symbiotic deal that would benefit both the parties involved and would also end up providing the users of Flipkart an upgraded, glitch free, smooth experience.

Recently, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella visited India and finalised a deal with Flipkart whereby Flipkart will use Microsoft’s Azure as its exclusive cloud platform. This deal would help Microsoft penetrate the Indian market which is already rife with competition in the cloud storage arena — with Google, IBM and Amazon’s Web Services already battling it out in our superheated startup-rich ecosystem.

“Combining Microsoft’s cloud platform and AI capabilities with Flipkart’s existing services and data assets will enable Flipkart to accelerate its digital transformation in e-commerce and deliver new customer experiences”, said Nadella.

Nadella was all praise for Flipkart at the event in Bangalore. He said, he has “always been an admirer of what Flipkart has done”. He further added that companies like Flipkart have undertaken this project of starting the Second Wave of Technology entrepreneurialism in India. The first wave occurred with Infosys being instituted in the early 80’s, per Nadella.

Flipkart plans to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning and analytics capabilities from Azure to match it up to the likes of Cortana Intelligence Suite and Power BI, in order to tweak its data and put the same to use in advertising, merchandising, marketing and customer service.

Well this definitely sounds like a good news for all of Flipkart’s customers as the company’s adoption of Azure would elevate user experience!

Flipkart has been consistently working in this direction after it faced certain glitches during its first Big Billion Day Sale. To solve problems at their end and to ensure glitch-free experiences to it’s users, Flipkart is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Google and dealing with the same vendors to accomplish the same.
Peeyush Ranjan, Head of Engineering at Flipkart proved this, “We are building the same kind of data centres Facebook and Google have. We are working with the exact same vendors”.

“Given Microsoft’s strong reputation in cloud computing, coupled with scale and reliability, this partnership allows us to leverage our combined strength and knowledge of technology, e-commerce and markets to make online shopping more relevant and enriching,” said Flipkart’s Bansal.

This deal with Flipkart is like a link in the chain for Microsoft, as it has exhibited interest in investing in startups to push its cloud business in India, in the past also.
“The centre of entrepreneurial energy for us in India is around cloud”, said Nadella.

In fact, if recent reports are to be believed then, even Google is attracting Indian startups, considering them as safer bets to meet it’s aim of “next billion users and acqui-hires in high-tech areas”.

All this has been made possible by the kind of conducive environment that India has produced by developments like the implementation of a payment infrastructure built atop Aadhaar using cloud (NPCI) and a diagnostic application (Collaborative Digital Diagnosis System).

It is not that Microsoft Azure is being put to use by a startup like Flipkart for the first time. Quite the contrary — Azure is being increasingly adopted by a lot of startups, — in fact over 2,000 Indian startups have begun using Azure during just the last one year.

To underestimate the status of Azure as potential cloud business contender to Amazon’s Web Services would be a naivety. AWS has been around the corner since 2003 and entered the services space without a trumpet call, but it sure has been the harbinger of cloud revolution.

AWS has made it big by utilising it’s early bird advantage and has managed to bushwhack other established IT players as it enjoys much greater scale, a supremely competent support team and extreme reliability. Consequently, it enjoys a portfolio that constitutes over one third of the market, as opposed to single-digit shares for both Microsoft and Google.

India, with its booming startups seems to be a very fertile ground for public cloud services market, so much so that it is projected to grow 38% in 2017 to total USD 1.81 billion as per estimates.

Amazon also has sworn to spend USD 5 billion to build its business in India. Additionally, the company also opened its first AWS region in India (Mumbai) last year and had more than 75,000 Indian customers then.

However, it’s interesting to see how Microsoft Azure is clawing into the market, trumping its #1 rival, AWS via it’s agreement with Flipkart, and making inroads into the Indian market.

The cloud war is picking up and it seems that every company wants to put its best foot forward to acquire supremacy over others.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.