After leaving Microsoft’s Azure last month, Ola Cabs has now completely abandoned Google Maps in favor of its own Ola Maps, according to founder-CEO Bhavish Aggarwal in a post on X. He said that the firm used to pay Rs 100 crore per year on Google maps, but that the transition to in-house Ola maps had reduced that figure to zero.
Aggarwal stated that Ola Cabs will receive a lot of new capabilities in the next months, including street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor photos, 3D maps, and drone mapping, among others.
In October 2021, Ola purchased GeoSpoc, a geospatial services firm based in Pune. Ola Maps now covers the mapping requirements of its main ride-hailing app. Furthermore, the business stated that it will integrate Ola Maps into its electric two-wheelers via a software update in January.
Aggarwal said in May that his company had opted to migrate its entire workload from Microsoft Azure to its own cloud platform, Krutrim.
The decision was in response to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removing Aggarwal’s post on ‘pronoun sickness’, in which he criticized the company for imposing a ‘forced ideology’ on gender pronouns.
This resulted in a loss of more than Rs 100 crore for Microsoft in India, as Ola was a major customer. He also extended an invitation to other developers, promising that if they chose to leave Azure, he would provide them with a full year of free cloud access.
The only restriction is that they do not return 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 stated that a domestic technology stack was required to drive the AI revolution and reduce reliance on large tech companies.
Currently, India generates 20% of the data, but just 3% of it is stored in the country.
“Data sovereignty means that both the location and control should be in India, not just the real estate,” Aggarwal explained. “So, we need to have our own cloud technology stack that controls the data.”
“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 claimed.
In 2017, Ola collaborated with Microsoft Azure to create a new connected vehicle platform for auto manufacturers globally. Ola has chosen Azure as its cloud service provider. In FY23, Microsoft’s income from India operations increased 39% year on year to Rs 19,230 crore.
Aggarwal launched Krutrim, a made-in-India generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform, last year.
Krutrim recently introduced Krutrim Cloud, an AI cloud service that provides developers and companies with access to sophisticated GPU resources to accelerate projects and increase productivity.