3 min readNew DelhiJul 7, 2024 05:04 PM IST
First published on: Jul 7, 2024 at 02:37 AM IST
After exiting Microsoft’s Azure last month, Ola Cabs has now fully exited Google Maps, moving to its in-house Ola Maps, founder-CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal has said in a post on X. He said that the company used to spend Rs 100 crore a year on Google maps, which they have made zero by this move to in-house Ola maps.
Aggarwal said that Ola Cabs will see a number of features in the coming months, which include street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps and drone maps, among others.
In October 2021, Ola had acquired GeoSpoc, a Pune-based company specialising in geospatial services. Ola Maps now supports the mapping requirements of its primary ride-hailing application. Additionally, the company said that it will integrate Ola Maps into its electric two-wheelers through a software update in January.
In May, Aggarwal had said that his company has decided to move its entire workload out of Microsoft Azure to its own cloud platform Krutrim.
The move was a reaction to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removing Aggarwal’s post on ‘pronoun illness’, in which he called out the platform for imposing a ‘forced ideology’ over gender pronouns.
This led to a loss of over Rs 100 crore for Microsoft in India, as Ola was its big customer. He also threw an invitation to other developers, saying if they wanted to move out of Azure, he will offer a full year of free cloud usage to them.
The only condition being that they should not go back to Azure after that.
Later, Aggarwal had said that India needs to have its own full technology stack, including artificial intelligence models, cloud infrastructure, data centres and chips.
He had said that domestic technology stack was needed to lead the AI revolution and lessen dependence on big tech firms.
Currently, India generates 20 per cent of the data, but only has 3 per cent of its data is stored within the country.
“Data sovereignty means that both, the location and control should be in India, not just the real estate. “So, we need to have our own cloud technology stack which controls the data,” Aggarwal had said.
“Unless, we build our own full stack, we won’t be able to harness the power of both economic productivity and cultural strength of our civilisation,” he had added.
In 2017, Ola had partnered with Microsoft Azure to build a new connected vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide. Azure came on board as a cloud services provider for Ola. In FY23, Microsoft’s revenue from India operations rose 39 per cent year-on-year to Rs 19,230 crore.
Krutrim is a made in India generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform that was launched by Aggarwal last year.
Recently, Krutrim launched AI cloud services called Krutrim Cloud to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity. FE
Ola Maps now supports the mapping requirements of its primary ride-hailing application. (Image source: Reuters) 
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