Amazon Web Services eyes growth from Indian firms going digital
2 min read . Updated: 06 Jan 2021, 08:04 AM IST
Premium- To address this growing demand for its cloud services, AWS had said in November that it will launch its second cloud region in Hyderabad that is expected to be operational by mid-2022
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon Inc., is eyeing strong growth from Indian companies across sizes and sectors that are moving to the cloud to stay relevant in the digital world.
“India is at an inflection point today riding on the digital wave which is a big opportunity for us," said Puneet Chandok, president – Commercial Business, Amazon Internet Services, AWS India & South Asia.
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In the last 8-9 months since the pandemic began, two sets of customers have emerged, said Chandok. “One is for whom business has slowed down and the other is for whom business has gone up. Both categories need the agility of the cloud."
The global end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020, according to Gartner. The proportion of IT spending that is shifting to cloud will accelerate post the covid-19 crisis, with cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.
AWS is witnessing traction from customers across the board – enterprises, small and medium businesses (SMBs), and startups.
“While enterprises and the mature SMBs are adopting cloud-native solutions, smaller companies are opting for our Digital Suite which is a business solutions package," said Chandok.
Some of AWS’s fastest-growing customers in India are from verticals like media & entertainment (Hotstar, Dream11, Tata Sky), financial services & insurance (Zerodha, PolicyBazaar.com, IndusInd bank), and manufacturing & automobile (Ashok Leyland).
A shift in trend is that today customers are increasingly moving their mission critical core workloads to the cloud. For example, RBL Bank has migrated more than 60 mission-critical applications including retail assets, banking operations, human resources, and customer-facing websites from its on-premises data centre to AWS. “We wanted to be ahead of that game," said Chandok.
To address this growing demand for its cloud services, AWS said in November last year that it will launch its second cloud region in Hyderabad that is expected to be operational by mid-2022. The AWS region in Hyderabad will consist of three availability zones at launch and will join the existing nine AWS regions and 26 availability zones across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.
The upcoming AWS Asia Pacific region in Hyderabad is part of Amazon’s continued investments in India. AWS launched its Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region in June 2016 to help customers in India save costs, increase speed-to-market of new products and services, and quickly expand their geographic infrastructure footprint.
“We are growing really fast, across sectors. We are trying to build India’s best technology team and will be hiring across profiles such as account teams, solution architects, professional services, and training," said Chandok.
