Ola To Shift Entire Workload To Sister Firm Krutrim The decision comes as a riposte to Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn blocking a post by the Ola founder on May 6.
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Bhavish Aggarwal, founder, Ola and Krutrim AI has said that Ola group will snap ties with Microsoft's Azure cloud and begin using the cloud service of its sister firm Krutrim AI.
The decision comes as a riposte to Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn blocking a post by the Ola founder on May 6.
In a post on the professional networking site, Aggarwal had termed the usage of the pronoun 'they' an "illness", prompting LinkedIn to take it down on the grounds that it fell afoul of its community policies.
In turn, Aggarwal said that the Ola group of companies would move their businesses inhouse.
"Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we've decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own @Krutrim cloud within the next week…" Aggarwal said in a post on microblogging site X.
"Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don't go back to Azure after that," he wrote.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">On <a href="https://twitter.com/LinkedIn?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Linkedin</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/Microsoft?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Microsoft</a> and their wokeness.<br><br>As an Indian institution, Ola is for genuine actions on diversity. We run one of the largest women only automotive plants. Not 1 out of 10 lines, or a small section, but the whole plant! Almost 5000 women now and will grow to tens of…</p>— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) <a href="https://twitter.com/bhash/status/1789217759378993611?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 11, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Agarwal's combative announcement comes just days after Krutrim AI, the artificial intelligence unicorn founded by him, opened up its cloud infrastructure and cloud services for business.
Aggarwal also took aim at prevailing business models in his post on Saturday."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.
Ola will help build a digital public infrastructure (DPI) social media framework similar to Unified Payment Interface (UPI) to counter what Aggarwal termed as "Linkedin's "monopoly".
"The only "community guidelines" should be the Indian law. No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned," said the 38-year old technology founder.
In a series of posts following LinkedIn's actions against his post, Aggarwal intensified his protests.
"Dear @LinkedIn this post of mine was about YOUR AI imposing a political ideology on Indian users that's unsafe, sinister," he said.
In 2017, Ola Cabs had moved to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, adding that Azure would also power and market the former's connected car platform Ola Play. Azure competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud in India. In FY23, Microsoft's India entity reported a 39 per cent rise in operating revenue to INR 19,229 crore, partly helped by rising demand for Azure and for its AI services to enterprise clients.
