Cloud a big game changer; tremendous momentum in its adoption: Nadella

Nadella, in his address, listed cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as imperatives that can be helpful in driving economic growth

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said there is tremendous momentum in cloud adoption, as he termed cloud a "big game changer".

Nadella, who is currently in India, addressed Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit in Mumbai on Tuesday.

He is also scheduled to visit Delhi and Bengaluru this week, and will be meeting key customers, startups, developers, educators and students during his India visit.

Nadella, in his address on Tuesday, listed cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as imperatives that can be helpful in driving economic growth.

"Cloud has been a big game changer... cloud is in early-to-intermediate innings...," Nadella said and noted the "tremendous momentum in cloud adoption."

According to research firm IDC, the overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach USD 13 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 23.1 per cent for 2021-26. The revenue totaled USD 2.8 billion for the first half of 2022.

Public cloud service (PCS) makes computing and storage applications available on demand to organisations and individuals over the public internet. A private cloud model's resources are available only to a single organisation.

Top cloud computing providers in India include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft's Azure.

Hyderabad-born Nadella also lauded the way in which India is building public infrastructure.

He said, "... we see tremendous momentum today, when it comes to cloud adoption. In fact, when I think about Microsoft Windows, in the client server era, we sold a few servers in the cloud. It's a completely different ballgame. But I look at every business in the cloud consumption."

".. We are adding a fourth region in Hyderabad as well. So we are very committed to making quality cloud infrastructure available everywhere," he added.

Nadella further said that energy efficiency will be one of the key components that will help economic growth in the future.

"... If you want to have economic growth going forward, you have to have an economic growth paradigm that doesn't consume energy at the rate at which we consume. And that's sort of going to be, I think, one of the key things to keep in the context of India and India's growth," Nadella said.

Talking about automation, he said, the next big thing is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"So the first thing though, you have to really build a robust data infrastructure, ... you can not benefit from a lot of AI if you don't have robust data infrastructure, and that's where we invest in," Nadella added.

On India probably becoming the third largest economy by the end of the decade, Nadella said, Github -- - which is sort of a place to see what's happening with developers worldwide, the growing AI projects and upskilling are the three things that are positive for the country.

"What is most important in the labour force is constantly updating the skill and taking pride in it and the market forces rewarding it. That's magic when education is more continuous. I think these are three things that make me very optimistic about India." he said.