Witnessing an inflection point in customer spending on cloud technology, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is eyeing expansion in the ‘critical’ India market by leveraging ‘huge opportunities’ in sectors such as financial services, media and entertainment, and telecom, a senior company official said.
“This is the perfect storm for digitalisation in India, and we are seeing a huge inflection point towards customers investing in cloud technology,” said Ashish Dhawan, MD, enterprise, mid-market and global business, South Asia, AWS.
“AWS is growing its footprint in India, and we are committed to investing in India and putting the power of AWS Cloud directly in the hands of our customers, our partners, and developers,” he added.
Mr. Dhawan added that India was a very critical market for AWS and the company’s announcement of its second region (Hyderabad) here is testament to the fact it is seeing more customer demand here and is investing to cater to that demand.
“The growth in India, is not just in the enterprise segment which I manage, but also in segments like Digitally Native Businesses (DNB) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), because India is home to a number of B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies,” he said.
Mr. Dhawan said last year was a great year for customers migrating their critical workloads such as SAP to AWS and the company had also seen new investments in analytics and machine-learning workloads. For example, he said, HDFC Life had created a data platform called Atom, which used AWS Cloud to analyse customer expectations and engage meaningfully with them across online platforms.
“So, [there has been] some great momentum over the year across analytics and machine learning. There is a data-driven and innovation-driven approach by customers to run critical workloads like SAP and other applications on AWS, which means more application migration and modernisation. These are the two growth areas for us, which revolve around application migration and modernisation and the second is around data-driven workloads,” he said.
Replying to a query, Mr. Dhawan said India presented a large opportunity for AWS to help financial-services customers transform their banking and insurance platforms. He added that payments and capital market was also an emerging market opportunity for the company.
“The media and entertainment industry is also an opportunity for us. From content creation to content distribution to the digital supply chain, AWS is enabling all our larger OTT customers deliver content in India, especially during this pandemic time. Lastly, the telecom industry is another important market for us given that it has seen a resurgence during the pandemic, and working from home has led to an increase in broadband usage,” he added.
