Microsoft now has over 14,000 partners in India who are helping customers drive business growth and digital acceleration amid the pandemic, a top company executive has said.

Globally, the company has more than 400,000 partners and 95 per cent of Microsoft's commercial revenue comes through partners.

"In India, we have a 14,000 plus partner ecosystem that delivers value to businesses and to the country's economy. Partners play different roles -- as a services scale partner, a global system integrator, a managed service provider, etc. With our partners, we share a common goal here to help customers drive business growth and digital acceleration," said Alok Lall, Partner Technology Lead, Microsoft India.

During a virtual roundtable ‘Partners of Choice' on Wednesday, Microsoft said that its offerings are helping partners in the life-cycle of building the solutions, getting them to market, reaching new customers and be available and discoverable on the marketplace by millions of customers.

"Our experience has been that digital transformation means different things for different clients. For some, it's an enterprise-wide transformation and driving the tech acceleration or adding intensity. That's where the more progressive ones are headed," said Lall.

While for others, it's more around driving growth or managing business model disruptions.

"While there could be some others who are looking at a more functional transformation of the front office or back office or reshaping the supply chain or workforce transformation and so on and so forth. So, it's a very diverse pattern," he added.

According to Sudhir Kothari, CEO and Managing Director at Embee Software, the opportunities for the small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India are massive.

"We see all kind of opportunities in SMBs right now -- ERP, CRM collaboration, security and hybrid cloud solutions. The decision-making and inclination is towards cloud innovation. This is something where Microsoft has a big role to play with their offerings," Kothari said.

Shreeranganath Kulkarni, Chief Delivery Officer, Birlasoft said that people have started looking at the adversity of Covid as an opportunity.

"It is evident that Covid has accelerated the digital journey for all of us. At this point of time, we should look at the advantage of partnering together. As a service provider, we understand the domain. We have the industry knowledge and know where our clients are present across industry verticals," Kulkarni added.