Satya Nadella wants Microsoft to be a platform for innovation in India

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella paid a visit to Delhi to meet with students, developers, and entrepreneurs in the country in an event titled "Tech for Good, Ideas for India." Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Finance, was present at the event, and Nadella also met with Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, to discuss how Microsoft can play an increasing role in the government's Digital India initiative.

Although brief, this is Nadella's fourth visit to India since he became the CEO of Microsoft two years ago. Apart from a brief showcase of Microsoft products and services at the Future Unleashed event in Mumbai last year, Nadella has focused his attention on innovation and the digital transformation occurring in India.

We look at this as a platform for you because that's at the core of our mission – our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. It's not about celebrating our technologies; it is about really celebrating the technologies that you all in India create. In fact, I want us to be the platform creators that foster the ingenuity of what is happening in India.

In one of his earlier visits, he announced local data centers in Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai for Microsoft Azure, becoming one of the first global public cloud providers to offer services in India from local data centers.

Now, Nadella is excited about bots and conversations-as-a-platform to get things done. The executive also shared how intelligent devices that understand human speech along with augmented reality are changing the technology landscape.

He talked about building solutions to "change the world we see to see a change in the world," with Microsoft being the platform that fosters the ingenuity. The keynote was aimed to inspire a generation of young achievers and entrepreneurs in the audience to innovate for the country.

Abhishek Baxi