Microsoft Announces Intelligent Cloud Delivery Strategic Partnership With Etisalat Digital

For many years through the noughties and early years of the 2010s, Microsoft seemed like a sleeping giant as many other tech giants passed it by in terms of innovation and newer products. However, just when it seemed that the tech giant was either unable or unwilling to get its act together; it did just that and came up with products that were going to turn it into a juggernaut once again.

One of those products is the company’s cloud computing service named Azure, which has managed to become one of Microsoft’s biggest revenue drivers and has managed to attract a lot of clients in its short sting. In a new development, Microsoft announced that it had partnered with Abu Dhabi based firm Etisalat Digital on a strategic level as it prepares the official launch of Azure and associated products in the United Arab Emirates. Etisalat will be Microsoft’s distributor of sorts in the UAE and will be engaged in providing Microsoft Cloud service solutions to businesses, government agencies and other institutions. Needless to say, even the largest corporations need the expertise of a major local player in order to make meaningful inroads into the market, and Etisalat will perform that function for Microsoft.

The regional general manager of Microsoft Gulf, Sayed Hashish spoke about the merits of the collaboration. He said,

This strategic collaboration between Microsoft and Etisalat Digital is an effort towards achieving a shared vision of enabling organizations in the UAE to accelerate their digital transformation journeys by embracing the cloud – and help them better engage their customers, empower employees, optimize operations and transform their products and services.

It could prove to be a very smart move on the part of Microsoft as it tries to make Azure and other services the global standard in terms of cloud computing. Although Amazon’s Amazon Web Services remains the global leader in cloud computing by some distance, Azure remains its main competitor, and it remains to be seen how the company manages to chip away at the lead in the years to come.