Microsoft will use LinkedIn to expand market for cloud products?

India will be crucial to Microsoft as it seeks to make its acquisition of LinkedIn a success by using the platform to expand the market for its cloud products through the vast membership of professionals on it.

The country is the second biggest base for the professional biggest base for the professional networking site, with 35 million registered members. That's up 10 times from 3.4 million in 2009, the year it opened its office in India. That equates to a compounded annual growth rate of 40% in these seven years. Earlier this month, it opened a bigger R&D and engineering facility in Bengaluru--its biggest in Asia--with plans to have more localized content and develop technology to make it easier to access LinkedIn on 2G connections.

Similarly, for Microsoft, India is critical for its cloud products. Chief executive Satya Nadella has been focusing heavily on cloud products such as Office 365 ever since he took charge in 2014.

In India, it has invested in three data centres, and Microsoft India chairman Bhaskar Pramanik told TOI last year that India is one of the first countries outside the US where the company has made such big investments in data centres. "It will be one of the largest footprints in terms of data centre capacity in India. In terms of scale, scope and capability, we are going to change the way computing will happen here," he had said Cloud usage in India is growing dramatically, as evident in the establishment of big data centres not only by Microsoft , but also by the likes of Amazon and IBM.

Public cloud data centres are emerging as enterprises move their workloads to the cloud, rat her than keep them on internal servers, which is both capital intensive (requires real estate and purchase of expensive hardware and software) and operationally expensive (because of the need to hire an army of IT staff to maintain the systems and pay for expensive power and air-conditioning to cool the systems).

These elements of cloud also make it very attractive for small enterprises. For banks and government, data centres in India are essential because of regulations that prohibit the movement of many kinds of data that they deal with beyond the geographic boundaries of the country.

Connecting LinkedIn to Microsoft Office 365 can help the attendees of meetings learn more about one another directly from invitations in their calendars. Sales representatives using Office can pick up useful titbits of background on potential customers from LinkedIn data. It's many such synergies that the two expect to exploit.