AWS began offering its technology infrastructure platform in 2006. “At this point, we have over a million active customers using AWS in every imaginable way, we have developed considerable experience operating at scale,” says Bikram Singh Bedi, head of India region, Amazon Web Services. Amazon has also innovated and delivered at a very rapid pace—delivering 159 significant features and services in 2012, 280 in 2013, and over 516 new features and services in 2014. “Expect this focus on rapidly delivering what customers want to continue,” he tells
Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interaction. Excerpts:
Who is adopting cloud solutions in India—large enterprises, SMBs, or a mix of the two?
There is fast adoption of AWS cloud services across India and that range from developers, start-ups, small-to-mid size companies, enterprises and education institutions. Our customers include Tata Motors, NDTV, Macmillan India, Eros International, Ramco, Apeejay Stya and Svran Group, Living Media, Malayala Manorama among many others. SMBs such as Ferns N Petals, BookMyShow, Hungama, InMobi, redbus, vServ.Mobi, as well as startups including Hike, Hotelogix, Mindtickle, Zipdial, HackerEarth, Classle are all examples of AWS customers. We also have a large and vibrant channel partner ecosystem that is helping customers to migrate to the cloud, and develop innovative solutions on AWS platform to serve not only the domestic market, but also global market.
How important is the India market to AWS?
India is a very important market to AWS. We have over 12,000 customers in India and growing at a very rapid pace. Popular AWS workloads for customers in India include website hosting, Big Data analytics, social games, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, disaster recovery, mission critical business applications such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Sharepoint, and start-ups launching new as well as innovative businesses on AWS.
Amazon has five offices across India and local personnel such as marketing, business development, channel development, solution architects, technical support, training and enablement that are already focused on helping AWS customers and channel partners over the last few years.
AWS has already established two edge locations in Mumbai and Chennai for Amazon CloudFront in July 2013, which demonstrates our local commitment and investment in India. It enables businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users in India with low latency and high data transfer speeds. AWS may consider India data centres in the near future.
In 2011, we released over 80 significant services, updates and features; in 2012, nearly 160; in 2013, 280. In 2014, we remained ahead of last year’s pace and launched more than 516, up more than 80% year-on-year. The pace at which we are developing and delivering these services to our customers is very fast.
What are the key benefits that AWS offers?
The first benefit is the reliability of AWS cloud platform. AWS has a strong performance record that we have honed over nine years that are used by our more than one million active customers in every imaginable use cases. The second benefit is security. The AWS cloud infrastructure has been architected to be one of the most flexible and secure cloud computing environments available today.
The third benefit is the cost effectiveness of AWS, which is an important factor for most of our customers, especially in India. With AWS, customers only pay for the resources they use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. The fourth benefit is scalability. Backed by AWS’ massive global infrastructure across 11 regions, customers have access to the virtually unlimited infrastructure resources whenever they need them.
The fifth benefit is flexibility. AWS has over 40 services that we have innovated since 2006, and they are invented on behalf of our customers by listening carefully to them on what they want and what are important to them.
What is the outlook for cloud business in general and the AWS cloud business in particular in India this year?
Today, cloud is the new normal. We are witnessing adoption of AWS across the board with different kinds of workloads. There is virtually no industry which is not using the AWS platform. CIOs across industries in India are asking us which workloads they can migrate to the cloud first, instead of asking whether they should migrate to the cloud. We are helping them by identifying applications that can easily move to the cloud, which typically include the likes of human resource management systems, talent management systems, financial and ERP applications, digital properties, test and development work loads among many others.
