Microsoft creating new marketplaces, services and experiences to foster entrepreneurship in India Capitalizing on new age of computing that can change the landscape of India.

To be in line with big budget initiatives of Facebook and Google to foster entrepreneurship in India, Microsoft is capitalizing on new age of computing that can change the landscape of India.

Realizing the opportunities India offers, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, visited India to project the company's move towards encouraging entrepreneurship. "Every time I visit India, I am always captured by the entrepreneurial energy in terms of how entrepreneurs are able to see the opportunities ahead and how they overcome constraints with ingenuity, which is great to see," said Nadella.

Addressing a large gathering of entrepreneurs in Mumbai, he said, "It's actually mind-blowing to see how e-commerce is progressing in this country. The estimates say by 2020, $100 billion commerce will happen just as e-commerce. We are partnering with JustDial, Paytm and Snapdeal not only to help them but enhancing the impact they have across supply chain and customer base."

As per Microsoft, the motive behind these new partnerships is to help create "new marketplaces, services and experiences" for customers. These companies will leverage Microsoft's cloud and mobile technologies as well as services like Bing, Skype and Cortana.

Computing to bring change

Along with encouraging startups and entrepreneurship, he focused on personal computing, new types of computing and computers. According to him, the new age of computing can bring about the change in education, healthcare and many other fields in this landscape.

"We have in fact run some accelerators in India, for some couple of years and have tremendous success and one of the things excited to me is the kind of startups that is coming up and can change the landscape of urban India," he said.

He observed that the application developers doing social welfare by creating innovative platforms. He cited the example of developer who calls himself an accidental developer because he was a musician and created an application called StaffPad, changing the way music is composed. He had this dream to change how music is created.

The future is cloud technology

Apart from this, Nadella foresees that the future computing would be a wearable technology, there would be the computers in the every room that we walk in, big screens, small screens, so computing will be everywhere. Going ahead key will be the mobility of our human experience across all that computing fabric and that's going to be possible because of the cloud.

Thus, understanding that the time is a scarce resource for entrepreneurs, Microsoft is stressing on the reinvention of productivity and business process through computing. "We want to make sure that work no longer is a place you go to, work is about making things happen and getting things done wherever you are that's why that notion of mobility of experience.

Work is also not solo experience anymore," explained Nadella. Various public sector organizations throughout the country are using technology in the education sector to truly create citizen services that are just going to change the lives of the people in this country.

"People of India have a tremendous opportunity ahead, and we want to play a small part by empowering them with digital technology so that they can live their life to the fullest and chase their dreams and achieve more," said Nadella.

(This article first appeared in the Indian edition of Entrepreneur magazine (December, 2015 Issue)).