Satya Nadella Wants To Decode India’s Future

The India-born CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, is on a whirlwind tour of the country as he looks to energise Indian developers to work towards a long term vision while developing their products and services. Nadella shared his thoughts on the future of technology and specifically the opportunity to leverage a better cloud infrastructure as he addressed the country’s top CEOs in Mumbai on Monday, as part of Microsoft’s annual Future Decoded conference series.

Cloud computing is certainly a top priority for Microsoft’s Azure, which, according to some estimates, is a distant second to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by a sizable margin with the former representing 17.6% of the market vs 32.4% held by AWS. India, which was seen only as the world’s back-office until recently, has been in the spotlight lately with global tech firms vying with Indian startups to capture the imagination of its billion plus population.

Addressing a chronic problem of Indian companies, Nadella said, “Indian firms have to build their own tech capability. That’s going to be one of the most defining things in the next decade.” He further added that it would be important for companies to consider trust in technology, especially in areas such as privacy, Artificial Intelligence, cyber security, etc. Businesses also need to think beyond consumer-facing technologies but think more holistically about how technology can improve their own internal processes and increase efficiency, productivity and profitability when they broaden their horizons.

Fireside Chat with Mukesh Ambani

Later, at the event, Satya Nadella sat down with Mukesh Ambani for a fireside chat about what the next 10 years could represent. It should be noted that in August last year, Ambani and Nadella had announced a cloud computing partnership between Jio and Microsoft as part of a collective offering to Indian businesses.

Ambani noted that in a short span of just a few years, India now has one of the best mobile networks anywhere in the world and that more people have access to high-speed internet today than ever before. He also pointed out that “Pre-Jio, mobile data speeds was at 256 kbps, which we call broadband in India, and post Jio, we now have 21 Mbps on mobile data as the average speed available in every single village in India.” He further added that prices have also come down drastically, noting “The pre-Jio price of data in this country was between Rs 300 and Rs 500. And for the poorest of poor people who use 2G, the prices were as high as Rs 10,000. Post-Jio the price is between Rs 12 and Rs 14 a GB. And the usage. A lot of what Jio has achieved in the last three years is 380 million customers have migrated to this 4G technology.”

Speaking on their partnership with Microsoft, Ambani said that small, medium, and micro enterprises are a key area of focus. “We have to realise that for India, they really provide 70 percent of India’s employment. They drive 40 percent of India’s export. And they are critical to all the economic activity that we see”, he said. Through this partnership, the aim is to empower them with better tools and datasets that will help them grow faster and accelerate development spanning sectors and industries. In doing this, India has an opportunity to be a premier digital society in the world and one of the world’s top three economies.

What the future holds

At the end of his remarks, Ambani noted that gaming doesn’t really exist in India, “it’s very hard to imagine that gaming will be bigger than music, movies and TV shows all put together, but we’ve been seeing it.” This would surely excited Nadella as Microsoft is present across the gaming ecosystem — from PCs, to consoles, to game publishing, as well as the next frontiers — Virtual Reality and cloud gaming.

As Ambani mentioned, you could argue whether India’s digital transformation will propel the country into the top echelons of the global economy. “There is no doubt in anybody’s mind we can argue about whether it will happen in five years of 10 years, but it’s gonna happen: we will be in the top three countries in the world”, he said.

Well, we won’t take him up on that argument! We’re here for the ride!