Employees walk past the reception booth of Microsoft's new office in Hong Kong. (Photo : Getty Images)
Microsoft is set to increase its investment in China's cloud computing market as a top executive in charge of the company's cloud service said on Wednesday, Sept. 21, that its cloud platform Microsoft Azure is projected to grow tenfold in the country, China Daily reported.
"China regards technological innovation as an important driving source for development, which let us see China's huge market potential for the cloud business," according to Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president of Microsoft cloud and enterprise group.
More than 10 new services, which include image recognition and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, on Microsoft Azure have been launched by Microsoft, in partnership with 21Vianet Group Inc, a data infrastructure provider based in Beijing, the report said.
"We will work together with local partners to develop customized cloud services and user-experiences in China," Samuel Shen, chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific Technology Company Ltd, said.
Microsoft Azure operates in 34 regions around the world and it has 70,000 Chinese corporate clients. Last year, its users and revenue had grown to triple digit, the company said.
In addition, Microsoft has partnered with China Daily to establish a global media cloud platform and a laboratory for innovative technology as well as to foster technical innovation and the application of cloud computing and big data in the media sector.
The global computing industry is projected to increase nearly 17 percent to $204 billion this year and expected to reach $312 billion in 2019, research firm Gartner Inc said.
"The cloud services newly launched by Microsoft in China will extend its global competence into the Chinese market, and it will further help Chinese enterprises engage customers and accelerate digital transformation," Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc, was quoted as saying.
In China, Internet giants such as Alibaba Group's cloud computing subsidiary Aliyun and Amazon.com Inc's cloud unit Amazon Web Services have intensified their efforts to expand their cloud computing business.
