Russian IT solutions and services company Softline Group has announced its foray into the Indian market. Softline Services India, a direct subsidiary of Softline Group, has partnered with Microsoft to deliver cloud services to Indian companies.

"Our revenue so far has been concentrated on Europe and Latin America region. In our last strategic meeting, we identified that the growth now has to come from emerging markets. And, Softline's India foray is part of our growth strategy", said Atul Ahuja, Managing Director, Softline Services India.

The company, which is now present in Brazil, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, serves over 3000 clients globally on cloud and plans to extend its capabilities to Microsoft in India in line with its growth plans. Softline is working with Microsoft in 27+ countries, and also in India.

As Microsoft cloud partner, Softline India will provide businesses with a full spectrum of IT services including technology consulting, licensing and software delivery, cloud services and hardware solutions.

The company said mobility, cloud, and data centre manageability are its key focus areas for the Indian market.

"According to Management consulting firm Zinnov, the cloud computing market within India is expected to reach $1.08 billion by 2015, and Softline with its strength of more than 300 cloud experts and proven deployment capabilities has entered the market to realise the expectation. Among the BRIC countries and the US, India has the second largest concentration of SMBs and it also contributes more than 60 percent to the Indian GDP. With a growing demand to migrate to top of the line IT products and services, Softline along with Microsoft sees this as a vast business opportunity", Ahuja added.

Softline's cloud expertise will offer the development and implementation of cloud strategy or its individual elements, for companies in the private and public sectors. Besides classification of resources, services and business processes, it will also offer other services such as development of options for optimising the IT infrastructure with private, public and hybrid cloud.

In large enterprises, Softline India will look to collaborate with larger system integrators for project implementation, while in SMBs the company plans to take the complete ownership of projects.

Commenting on the expansion plans, Ahuja said, "We are already in three cities Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi. We plan to expand to four more metros, and then to Tier-II cities".

By March 2015, Softline India said it plans to hire about 50 people with sales and services capabilities.

Ahuja further added Softline will make India as its centre of excellence and use the talent to service other geographies. "We do not see India just from a sales perspective, but we see it more from services perspective".