New Delhi, Feb 11 (IANS): In another bid to empower organisations with advanced hybrid cloud capabilities, Microsoft India on Thursday announced the general availability of Azure Stack HCI, a new hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution.

Microsoft said it is collaborating with chip-maker Intel to take Azure Stack HCI to the market in the country.

Azure Stack HCI aims to empower businesses by enabling them to build and run cloud-native applications with seamless access to cloud services on-premises with existing tool, processes, and skillsets, the company said in a statement.

"Azure Stack HCI brings together the familiarity and flexibility of on-premises virtualisation with powerful new hybrid capabilities. This will enable organisations to be adaptive, agile, efficient, and responsive across locations, optimising operations and IT cost efficiency in an increasingly remote work environment today," explained Rajiv Sodhi, COO, Microsoft India.

The new offering combines infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services in a software stack that spans on-premises data centres and Microsoft's Azure Cloud, providing the latest and up to date security, performance and feature updates.

"Azure Stack HCI simplifies how IT can access Azure services based on what makes sense for their business, whether that is on premises or in the cloud," said Prakash Mallya, VP and MD–Sales, Marketing and Communications Group, Intel India.

Intel supports Azure Stack HCI through a broad set of technologies foundational to scaling, processing, and moving workloads.

Compatible with both Windows and Linux virtual machines, Azure Stack HCI solutions will be available from 20 partners offering Microsoft-validated hardware systems to ensure optimal performance and reliability, the company said.