Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was in Bengaluru on Monday to attend an event and speak on Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani, announced at the meeting that his company was entering into a strategic partnership with Flipkart, where the start-up would exclusively use the software giant's Azure platform.
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While chairing a talk with Nilekani on the topic of "winning in the cloud-first, mobile-first world," Nadella called out Flipkart Group CEO Binny Bansal — who was also on the stage — and made the announcement. A company like Flipkart using Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service for its business solutions will be an interesting case study, and could also help Microsoft develop stratagem for Azure to be adopted by smaller start-ups.
How will the partnership work?
Precious little is known about the partnership as of now. However, given that Microsoft Azure offers a bevy of "solutions" in digital marketing, big data and analytics, e-commerce and also business intelligence, Flipkart can be expected to take advantage of all these services when the full-scale adoption happens.
What will also be interesting to watch out for is whether Flipkart, which is yet to turn out a profit in any quarter since the day it was found, manages to turn around its finances with this integration, or continues to lose investors' money and get devalued.
Wishful thinking
One way Flipkart can look to capitalise on its partnership with Microsoft by working exclusively on Azure is by building games. Yes, Azure has a gaming component that lets people "build, quickly launch and reliably scale your games across platforms and refine based on analytics."
Given how Steam has gone from strength to strength by selling games and downloadable content online, and often offering heavy discounts — much like Flipkart — the Indian start-up can take a cue from that business model. However, lest you start preparing your consoles, please be advised that there is no indication that anything of this sort is taking place, and this is just some wishful thinking on behalf of this correspondent.
Watch the video of the announcement here:
