Flipkart to use Microsoft Azure for cloud services

Bengaluru: “Binny and I have an exciting announcement to make. Flipkart has chosen Microsoft Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform,” said the India-born CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, at the Microsoft AI event on Monday.

Mr Nadella aims to empower entrepreneurship in India by building partnerships with companies such as Flipkart. The Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal said that Flipkart’s strategic partnership with Microsoft will help his company to scale up in the coming days.

“Microsoft Azure and Artificial Intelligence as a platform can help us scale up our e-commerce business,” said Mr Bansal. “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 for customers.”

Mr Nadella, who is in India to attend Microsoft’s technology and business conference, shared the stage with Nandan Nilekani and spoke about the importance of technology in the public sector.

He also spoke about IndiaStack, a set of APIs that provide unique digital infrastructure aimed at eliminating problems related to presence-less, paper-less and cash less service delivery.

While talking highly of IndiaStack, Mr Nadella said that “it was truly fascinating and the art form of knowing where the government needs to participate.” It is ramping up as good as any technology platform.

He also commended the inclusion of e-KYC (Know Your Customer) and said that the process was “brilliantly done.”

Mr  Nadella further said that he’s excited about three platforms—cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AP) and Augmented Reality (AR)—offered by Microsoft and emphasised  the importance of Microsoft Azure, Cortana and Microsoft HoloLens.   

Mr Nadella believes in building platforms in a network model to help every entrepreneur in the ecosystem to leverage it. “It is short-sighted to think about just one platform,” he said. “You need to have an architectural world view of building a platform that acts as an ingredient for someone to build a platform.”

Commenting on the entrepreneurial energy in the country, Mr Nadella said “In the past 12 months we have had over 2,000 startup accelerators,” adding that he looks forward to partnering with Indian startups in the coming days.