Recent News

Microsoft launched its local data centres in India, which will offer its Azure cloud services, much earlier than its deadline of December this year, a move that will help it build more confidence among the government, Indian companies and small and medium businesses in the country. The centres are being launched at Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. “The hyper scale cloud will empower governments, businesses and users and offer enough computing power that will support all their existing workloads,” said Bhaskar Pramanik, Microsoft India chairman.

Redmond-based technology major Microsoft globally launched its new suite of office applications – Office 2016 – which may just sound the death knell for email as we know it. It also throws down the gauntlet at Google’s collaborative apps that run inside a browser.“We set out to make working together easier and more impactful by building a suite of integrated apps and services that removes barriers and empowers teams to do and achieve more,” said, Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Client applications

Rituraj Singh, a student of the electronics and communication department at Oriental University, Indore, has brought laurels to the city by helping Microsoft make an entry into Guinness Book of World Records for training maximum people in computer programming in just eight hours at Microsoft Redmond Campus, USA. After helping Microsoft bag a world record, Rituraj now imparts training to people in India to achieve ‘Digital India’ dream of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Microsoft has tied up with mobile wallet MobiKwik to offer cash back offers on purchase of its Lumia range of smartphones, including Lumia 540, 535, 430, 640, 640 XL and 730. Raghuvesh Sarup, Director – Marketing, Mobile Devices, Microsoft India, said, “Offering cashbacks in the form of digital cash on MobiKwik wallet will make the payment experience for our consumer easy and convenient. Given that MobiKwik is accepted at over 50,000 places, this offer will also give our consumers a range of options to spend their cashback at.”

Microsoft is building on its cloud offerings with an expanded Azure Data Lake, arriving with analytics tools designed to simplify big data, and with a new query language. The Azure Data Lake Store, will store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data without forcing application changes as data scales. Data located in the Data Lake Store can be securely shared. It is also accessible from sensors connected to the Internet of Things.

Microsoft India continued its growth momentum during the fiscal 2015 in the Indian market with a solid 19% growth. Its biggest bet is on Windows 10 which was launched in July 2015. With the changed revenue model for the Windows 10, it aims to garner significant customer interest. According to Gartner, Microsoft maintained its #1 position in software revenues in India, accounting for 25% of the overall sales in 2014. The company earned more than $1 bn from the software business alone.

The company announced that it will bring its Bitlocker encryption and Secure Boot systems to the Windows 10 IoT Core public beta in a push to improve security. Those are the same features that Microsoft uses to protect other systems running Windows 10, and it goes to show one of the advantages of the company’s new operating system: Microsoft can migrate features from one version of Windows 10 to others fairly easily, in addition to allowing developers to build applications across a range of devices using the Windows universal app platform.

Google Capital, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu have taken part in a new $110 million (around 72 million, or AU$156 million) funding round for CloudFlare. First reported by Forbes, the funding round led by Fidelity gives the security startup a range of new strategic partnerships with which to extend its business beyond the 5% of all Internet requests that it processes per month.