Kudos to OLA … for standing up on principles

In a bold move of huge significance, OLA has announced that it will be moving its Rs 100 crore cloud business from Microsoft Azure to its own platform “Krutrim”.

Additionally OLA offers one year free cloud usage for any body else who want to shift from Azure to Krutrim.

Interested companies can contact exitazure@olakrutrim.com

The reason cited by Mr Bhavish Agarwal, CEO states that Microsoft AI on Linked In is trying to impose its political ideology on its users.

We appreciate the stand taken by OLA and urge other companies to explore and support the OLA initiative of avoiding dependence on Azure for their Cloud requirements.

We welcome comments from Cloud Experts .

Naavi

Refer:

Times of India: We dont need lectures from western companies..

https://chat.olakrutrim.com/home

Detailed post of Mr Bhavish Agarwal on the issue on his X account is reproduced here:

As an Indian institution, Ola is for genuine actions on diversity. We run one of the largest women only automotive plants. ot 1 out of 10 lines, or a small section, but the whole plant! Almost 5000 women now and will grow to tens of thousands in the coming years. And regarding gender inclusivity, we don’t need lectures from western companies on how to be inclusive. Our culture didn’t need pronouns to be inclusive for thousands of years. On a personal note, I had visited Ayodhya last year and learnt about how transgenders had been accorded special respect in our culture from ancient times! Here’s a short video from our national broadcaster DD on this – https://youtube.com/watch?v=goDQFIAZtt8…. On the other hand, the pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India. I wouldn’t have waded into this debate but clearly Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI system has a major impact on my business as it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it. This situation brings me to the need for us to build our own Indian tech platforms. I’m not against global tech companies. But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows. This is not about Ola or any of my companies. Ola is too small to make any impact against this. I want to confront this forced ideology as a free thinking Indian and do what I can in my capacity. So here are the actions I’m taking. Putting my money where my mouth is. ⁃While we can’t do anything about Linkedin’s monopoly overnight, I’m making a commitment to work with the Indian developer community to build a DPI social media framework. DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar etc are a uniquely Indian idea and is even more needed in the world of social media. The only “community guidelines” should be the Indian law. No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned. 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”! ⁃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. It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this. ⁃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! Mail us on exitazure@olakrutrim.com. Offer is perpetually open!

About Vijayashankar Na

Naavi is a veteran Cyber Law specialist in India and is presently working from Bangalore as an Information Assurance Consultant. Pioneered concepts such as ITA 2008 compliance, Naavi is also the founder of Cyber Law College, a virtual Cyber Law Education institution. He now has been focusing on the projects such as Secure Digital India and Cyber Insurance
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