How LinkedIn Could Make Microsoft Dynamics
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| How LinkedIn Could Make Microsoft Dynamics |
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 Bangalore--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. CEO 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 centers, and
Microsoft India chairman Bhaskar Pramanik told Times of India last year that
India is one of the first countries outside the US where the company has made
such big investments in data centers. "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 centers not only by Microsoft , but
also by the likes of Amazon and IBM.
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.