New Delhi, Dec 7 (IANS): Microsoft India has announced a 6 per cent price hike for its commercial on-premises software and online services, which include Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, starting February 1.

This will be the third consecutive year of price increase by Microsoft in India.

"Starting February 1, 2024, India INR prices for cloud products will increase by 6 per cent and on-premises software will also increase by 6 per cent," Microsoft said in a blogpost.

These changes, however, will have no effect on existing purchases placed by commercial clients under bulk licencing agreements for products that are "subject to price protection".

During the pandemic, Microsoft's business suite offerings were adopted significantly in India, driven by a sudden surge in adoption by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, the company announced its first-ever price increase in India in almost a decade in February 2022, with a price hike of about 20 per cent.

Starting from February 2023, Microsoft increased its prices in India by 11 per cent.

This move showed the company's efforts to take advantage of its growing user base in India, despite the challenges posed by the global economic slowdown and decreased cloud adoption.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced a number of new features which will be added to its Copilot service soon, including OpenAI’s latest models.

The company said soon Copilot will get support for GPT-4 Turbo, alongside an updated DALL-E 3 model.