When he was a computer science student at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the focus was on building super computers. Now, 30 years later, it is on renting cloud space, says Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, chief technical officer, energy and mobility, Microsoft India.

At the 63 ^rd Institute Day on Wednesday, the 1993-batch B. Tech computer science graduate would be presented with the distinguished alumnus award. Dr. Shivkumar, with two doctoral degrees from the U.S., was a full tenure professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. He gave up the post and returned to India “for personal reasons and to be closer to his parents”.

In his current position, his aim is to find ways to “leverage the advanced digital infrastructure that India has to bypass the physical infrastructure. India has a huge potential to become a software service provider for the world,” he says.

During his B. Tech days, he was among the few at his institute to have an email id. Computer science engineering students of his time dabbled in ways to get satellites to provide the Internet. Now computer science itself is offered as a service and its future is likely in how it can be applied to daily life as a utility, he says.

Computer science has evolved from generating data to finding ways to get a specific industry to adopt digitisation based on the data it has accumulated. It is this concept that he is bringing to Microsoft’s new business in renewable energy and e-mobility.

In the near future, he envisages connecting an electric scooter or autorickshaw to the internet. The idea is to transform the economics of any asset, he says. “Once you have something connected, it becomes magical. You could create a twin of the physical in the cloud,” he explains. “Your computer can monitor what is going on inside the vehicle. You can push some software. All the data (about the vehicle) would be available on your vehicle.”

This would particularly work to the advantage of fleet operators as such data about vehicles would be available in the cloud and the organisation collecting the data could share it with the financing company when the company wants to buy new vehicles.

In the case of renewable energies such as solar and wind, such data could facilitate an efficient use of the resources, he says. Advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning could be used to analyse the data gathered from the solar and wind energy farms to make them more efficient.

“If you want renewable energies to take off, you have to increase the return on capital. It is like your bank account that gives you more returns. At some point, the solar energy could even charge your e-scooter,” he points out.

Just as India led the information technology revolution in the early 1990s, it would lead in software services in the coming years, he prophecies, pointing to the speed with which India adopted digital wallets.