RIL’s Disruptive Cloud Gambit with Microsoft: Prabhu Ram, Head, IIG, CMR

By Prabhu Ram, Head - Industry Intelligence Group, CMR

At RIL’s 42nd annual general meeting (AGM) speech, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani kicked off Reliance Jio Infocomm’s foray into the cloud services market, in partnership with Microsoft, and offering services, including web hosting and data storage at very aggressive prices in a price-conscious market, in a move that could potentially disrupt the cloud services market dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the likes of Google and an array of other companies.

Over the next decade, the Jio-Microsoft commitment will potentially consolidate Jio’s Industry 4.0 play in an array of emerging tech areas.

Over the next decade, the Jio-Microsoft commitment will potentially consolidate Jio’s Industry 4.0 play in an array of emerging tech areas, ranging from AI to IoT, from Blockchain to Virtual Reality (VR), and targeting the small and medium enterprises, large enterprises as well as technology startups.

The Jio-Microsoft play on Cloud will see data centres initially set-up in Gujarat and Maharashtra, and later on, in other locations across India.

The Jio-Microsoft play on Cloud will see data centres initially set-up in Gujarat and Maharashtra, and later on, in other locations across India. The data centres would comprise of compute, storage, and networking capabilities, and will leverage Azure to support Jio’s innovative cloud offerings. Given that India is currently working on a regulatory framework on data privacy and localisation, the Jio offerings could see more enterprises making a switch to store their data locally in India.

Jio would also enable Indian tech startups with affordable access to cloud at very aggressive prices, for essentially as low as INR 1500.

Jio would also enable Indian tech startups with affordable access to cloud at very aggressive prices, for essentially as low as INR 1500, and enabling them to develop innovative products and services faster and more cost-effectively. This pricing undercuts other competitive offerings by a significant margin, and could unleash a cut-throat price competition.

In addition, Indian small and medium businesses will get access to a range of cloud-based productivity, collaboration and business applications including Office 365, while large enterprises will be able to accelerate their own digital transformations by leveraging new Jio solutions that can work with Microsoft offerings already in use today within many large enterprises.

There is also a significant vernacular push, with Jio leveraging blockchain and edge computing strategies with Microsoft’s speech and language cognitive services for its device ecosystem.

There is also a significant vernacular push, with Jio leveraging blockchain and edge computing strategies with Microsoft’s speech and language cognitive services for its device ecosystem, providing support in 13 Indian languages, with the flexibility to add other languages.

In conclusion, the Jio-Microsoft cloud foray would intensify the digital transformation of Indian enterprises – startups as well as large enterprises, by leveraging Jio and Microsoft’s competencies.