DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 12 May
Ola Group of companies including its ride-hailing app and EV manufacturing, will cut ties with Microsoft’s Azure cloud and move their operations to the cloud service of its sister firm, Krutrim AI.
Ola co-founder, Bhavish Aggarwal announced this decision on social media platform X. Ola will move its workload from Azure to Krutrim next week. Apart from moving its workload to Krutrim, the Ola CEO also offered other companies complimentary cloud storage for a year if they wished to move out of Azure.
The development came after LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, allegedly removed Aggarwal’s posts without giving him any intimation. He criticized LinkedIn for using AI techniques to impose what he called ‘woke’ views.
Aggarwal also pledged to work with other stakeholders to make India self-reliant on key technology stacks. He would work with Indian programmers to create a social media platform based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) standards.
“Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on “community guidelines,” he wrote.
His stand has received support from other Indian technology leaders for ending the monopoly of global tech giants.
Homegrown SaaS major, Zoho’s CEO Sridhar Vembu agreed with Aggarwal, saying “We in India have to strongly resist this woke imperialism”. “It is best understood as a fanatical religious doctrine that masquerades as a socio-political movement,” Vembu posted on the social media platform ‘X’.
The announcement of Ola co-founder has come days after Krutrim AI, the artificial intelligence unicorn founded by him, opened up its cloud infrastructure and cloud services for business. According to the company, Krutrim Cloud will be offering GPU-as-a-service on its AI computing infrastructure, allowing enterprises and developers to train and fine-tune their models. Krutrim AI has also recently launched its LLM (large language model), which is trained in 10 Indian languages.
