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Flipkart Partners With Microsoft For Cloud-Based Services

Microsoft’s cloud services platform Azure will form a strategic partnership with Flipkart.

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during a panel session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. (Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg)
Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during a panel session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. (Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg)

India's leading e-commerce company Flipkart has chosen technology major Microsoft Corp.'s Azure as its exclusive cloud service, forming a strategic alliance with the U.S.-based company.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella announced the strategic partnership in Bengaluru on Monday at an event, adding that he has always been an admirer of Flipkart, a company that has been getting India “on the map of cloud entrepreneurship”.

“This is just a start, it's all about to be able to support  entrepreneurs of India and to be able to create global scale businesses,” Nadella said.

Microsoft's Azure is a cloud-based platform that allows customization of data and applications which can be extended online. “Seamless hybrid cloud capabilities in Azure span infrastructure, data, user identity, apps and management,” according to its website.

“The question now is how to take e-commerce to the next 10 years. This partnership and understanding of Indian market and combined strength of e-commerce and technology on the Flipkart side and artificial  intelligence and the platform technology on Microsoft side, we can scale e-commerce in a tremendous way,” said Binny Bansal, chief executive officer, Flipkart reacting on the agreement.

Microsoft's strategic partnership with Flipkart, a company that needs cloud services to handle millions of transactions, will help the U.S. giant compete with peers like Amazon Web Services. Flipkart has also been competing with Amazon India, since it started an aggressive expansion in 2014.

The partnership is just the beginning of a relationship between the two, Nadella said at the event, adding that more partnerships need to be forged between companies in India and abroad.