India is key to Windows 8's success, says Ballmer

Last week, Microsoft held an India Technology Summit where they spoke about their product roadmap and also how they plan on further developing IT infrastructure and cloud computing in India. During the event, we were greeted with a message from Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer where he talked about how India will play a key role in the success of Windows 8. He said, “India is obviously an incredible bastion of software development.” He added, “Living in India and living aboard, the talent base is rich and unbelievable and certainly galvanizing the developer community in India, here in Mumbai and elsewhere in the country to get excited to see the possibilities and re-imagine Windows 8”. Windows 7 has been a huge success and Microsoft is hoping that Windows 8 will follow the same trend here. Back in 2010, just a year after Windows 7 launched, there were over 7,000 businesses that had adopted Windows 7 and according to a study conducted by CIO Association of India, around 80 percent were planning to deploy it by 2011. 

Gearing up for the big day

Windows 8 is just a part of their overall plans for India. The software giant is also concentrating on expanding IT infrastructure services and cloud computing. One of these areas include the private cloud. This set-up involves all the benefits of public cloud computing, which include self-service, scalability and elasticity, but with the added control and customizations that you get from dedicated resources. According to Sandeep Ganghi, Sr. Manager Data Center Operation’s at KPIT Cummins, “We have trimmed our physical server holdings from120 to merely 20 servers and expense have dropped drastically by 40 percent of our data center budget.” 

Windows 8 is a big deal for Microsoft, as it will be the first time that their OS will be usable on something other than the X86 architecture. Yes, Windows 8 will be coming to ARM devices as well, which expands the market for them even further as they can now tap into the mainstream tablet market and compete with Android and iOS tablets. Windows 8 on ARM or Windows RT, however is going to be a completely different beast compared to the existing Windows 7 tablets in the market, so it will be interesting to see how it performs and more importantly, how aggressively they price it.