Billionaire Mukesh Ambani on Monday announced a partnership between his Reliance Industries' telecom arm, Reliance Jio Infocomm, and Microsoft to “accelerate the digital transformation of our country”. As part of the “globally unique long-term alliance”, Mr Ambani said, Jio will set up a network of large world-class data centres across India and Microsoft will bring its cloud platform Azure into the telecom company's data centres. “Today, digital technology is transforming every place, every industry, everything,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who joined Mr Ambani at Reliance Industries' 42nd Annual General Meeting through video conferencing.
Here's the full transcript of what Mr Nadella said are the Reliance Industries AGM:
Thank you, Mukesh. It is such an incredible time to embark upon this partnership together.
Today, digital technology is transforming every place, every industry, everything. This rapid change is being driven by massive technology shifts - across the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge: Computing is becoming ubiquitous and distributed.
AI is being infused into every experience.
And the interaction model we have with computers is increasingly human-first, rather than device-first.
These advances are shaping the next phase of innovation, and they are creating new opportunity for people and organizations everywhere, especially in India.
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Core to this mission is deep partnerships, like the one we announced today with Jio.
Our ambition is to help millions of organizations across India thrive and grow in this era of rapid technological change.
Our long-term partnership combines the power of our technology - including Azure, Azure AI and Office 365 - with Jio's connectivity and digital solutions - which as you know are among the most used and fastest-growing in the world.
Together, we will offer comprehensive technology solutions - from compute and storage, to connectivity and productivity - to SMBs everywhere in the country.
Jio and Microsoft will partner to launch new cloud data centres in India, ensuring more organizations can access the tools and platforms they need to build their own digital capability.
Jio and Microsoft will jointly offer Office 365 so more organizations can empower their employees with a modern workplace.
And Jio and Microsoft will bring Azure Cognitive Services to more devices, creating new, breakthrough intelligent experiences, with support for 13 Indian languages and others to come.
At Microsoft, we don't celebrate technology for echnology's sake, but rather we celebrate what others are empowered to do with that technology.
And our ambition is to make all of these solutions broadly accessible and affordable so they can reach as many people and organizations in India as possible.
I'm excited to see how customers will be able to achieve more because of this partnership and I'm excited about our collective opportunity ahead.
Thank you so much.
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