Microsoft India has announced the India launch of SQL Server 2016, the data platform built with advanced predictive analytics capabilities. This is the first data platform to be born-of the cloud, designed to enable businesses to transform themselves with cloud, data and intelligence. SQL Server 2016 is Microsoft’s biggest leap into the future of data platform. It helps businesses with intelligence-based decision making, giving them a strong competitive advantage.

“Data is the new electricity for businesses today.  It gives our customers the opportunity to catapult their growth. Microsoft’s SQL Server 2016 is built for this data driven world – customer tested and battle ready,” said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, Microsoft Corporation India.

“SQL 2016 supports encrypted query processing capabilities for advanced analytics, machine learning, mobile business intelligence, and data integration that addresses the security concerns of customers. It is today the world’s only relational database to be born ‘cloud-first’ with the majority of features first deployed and tested on Azure,” he added.

Analyst firm IDC projects that the digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020 and will double every two years between now and 2020. This combined with cloud economics offering cost-effective compute capabilities is providing businesses an unprecedented ability to analyze and derive deep insights from this data, in real-time.

Elaborating on the business benefits and enhanced customer satisfaction, Munish Mittal, Group Head-IT & CIO, HDFC Bank said, “At HDFC Bank, customer convenience is at the core of all our endeavor. To enable access and convenience to our customers for our products and services across all platforms, we implement cutting edge technology solutions across the full spectrum of digital enterprise. Our Digital application platform and CRM systems uses Microsoft technology as the data platform. SQL Server not only offers good performance but also helps us in scaling up our systems at very optimal cost.”

SQL Server 2016 is powered by unique cloud capabilities that enable customers to deploy hybrid architectures that partition data workloads across on-premises and cloud based systems to help customers gradually move to the cloud, increase agility of their processes and save costs.

As per Gartner’s Magic Quadrants, Microsoft is a leader in analytics, business intelligence, databases, data warehouse and data management.  With thousands of customers across the world, SQL has almost 100 billion queries per day, with almost 400 million database log-ins per day.