Cloud computing has become an integral part of every organisation today, be it startups or enterprises which are progressively adopting it for scaling up and serving their customers better at a fraction of the cost. Also, India is becoming a big hub for independent software vendors who sell to other technology user companies, says Navdeep Manaktala, head of business development at Amazon Internet Services Private Ltd, which operates and manages Amazon Web Services (AWS) in India. In an interview with The Hindu , he spoke about the importance of cloud computing and the latest trends in this field. Edited excerpts:
How is cloud computing transforming businesses today?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing resources over the internet in a pay-as-you-use model. It is similar to turning on a switch; electricity companies send power and the lights turn on. Cloud has brought tremendous agility to IT, in terms of getting the resources companies need, on demand. The benefit with the cloud is that there is no limit to capacity, and capacity is available on demand. Despite what is provisioned for, the best part is not only does a customer get to use all the capacity, it can be scaled down when it’s not needed, scaled up in times of a spike, and it’s a pay per use model. That’s very important. That changed the whole dynamic of things. Earlier, a data warehouse was confined to a few companies, that had the ability to pay for data breadth, because they were large monolithic systems. Again, it was expensive to get conventional databases. That is not the case any more and there are no restrictions with the choice of databases.
How has the cloud helped startups disrupt industries?
AWS offers over 165 services covering everything from compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Internet of Things, security, mobility, hybrid services, and virtual reality. This changes the whole paradigm with what you can leverage and adopt, and this is where disruption is beginning. This was the genesis of all of the big startups we know today, like Airbnb, Netflix, Pinterest, Yelp. All these companies have disrupted entire industries. Airbnb has disrupted the whole hospitality industry. Lyft has disrupted the ride sharing industry, and companies like Netflix are changing the way we consume entertainment content. In India, companies like Swiggy and Zomato have disrupted the way people buy food. These apps help city dwellers order food from anywhere in their city. And look at the choices and the discovery parameters they offer; it has changed the whole paradigm of eating out. Another example of scale is Dream11 in the gaming space. They have taken gaming to the next level. Hotstar reaches 300 million monthly active users. With the last India Premier League, they hosted 18.6 million concurrent viewers during the 2019 final. And it runs on AWS.
How do you manage this kind of concurrence? What has changed on the infrastructure front?
We maintain a huge pool of infrastructure globally, and we are always adding to that infrastructure. On an average, every week, AWS customers are using more compute capacity on Amazon EC2 Spot instances than customers in 2013 were running across all of Amazon EC2. In 2011, we released over 80 new significant services and features; 1,430 in 2017; and 1,957 in 2018. Our business is to provide our customers with technology, which means we need to enhance our infrastructure continuously. Today, several startups in India runs on AWS. On the enterprise front, customers including HDFC Life, Vistara, Shoppers Stop, the Future Group, Brigade Group, and Kent RO among many others use AWS.
What are the new trends in cloud computing?
One of the most significant trends is that enterprise adoption of the cloud is going mainstream. Earlier, the enterprise segment only used the cloud for digital workloads, websites, mobile apps. Now mainstream enterprise workloads like SAP and Microsoft workloads are moving to the cloud. For enterprise, it is not about moving to the cloud or not. It is about how much to move to the cloud. It is about what goes first, and what goes after in terms of application and workloads. That is one of the big changes that has happened over the last few years. The second one is the focus on data. Every organisation today, in whatever shape and form, whether a newspaper, Ola Cabs, BigBasket, or a redBus, are all generating tonnes of data. Let’s take Jubilant Foods as an example. A significant portion of their workload is on AWS. They have a point of sales (POS), they have a website, a mobile app, and an ERP system, all on AWS. All of these companies, not only startups but also enterprises, want to do much more with that data. Earlier the POS data would sit in a separate database, the website and mobile app data would sit on a server somewhere else. The mobile team would look at the mobile data, and the website team would look at the website data, and so on. They would turn out MIS reports at the end of the day, end of the week, and month and that would give them some sense of what was sold. However, in most of these cases, it could be the same consumer who went to experience or consume the product at a physical store, checked the price on the website and then actually placed the order from an app. This pushed companies to start looking at consolidated data, to understand how they could better target individual customers.
How do you see companies using the data they are able to gather to improve their customers’ experience?
Companies across the board are analysing the data that is coming in, across various sources, and then doing a lot more with that data in terms of customer engagement, personalisation and recommendation. For instance, when shopping on an e-commerce site, the site recommends products to buy along with the product that the customer is buying. They are leveraging that data and learning about buying patterns. First, they have the ability to differentiate a customer’s experience. Second, they can upsell with recommendations based on past purchasing patterns, or similar purchasing histories, and third, they use data to help with customer retention. Once the experience is personalised, customers are more likely to go back to that company, versus one offering them a standard, undifferentiated experience.
You mentioned that there are two trends, what’s the other one?
India is becoming a big hub for independent software vendors (ISVs). So ISVs are companies which sell to other technology user companies. Not many people talk about them, but India is one of the largest ISV hubs globally. Most of the ISVs are built on the cloud, and on AWS. For example, Manthan provides retail analytics, Sprinkler provides social engagement, Clever Tap provides analytics solutions, Haptic provides an AI and ML based chat bot, and so on.
AWS has been in India for six years. How have you grown in India?
Two or three years ago in India, the discussion was largely with startups and it was largely around storage and compute. Companies came to us just for compute and storage. Today, we are discussing not only compute and storage, but also databases, analytics, AI and ML, networking and some 165 other services.
What is going to be the next round of growth?
It has already started. Enterprises like Jubilant Foods, Vistara, Tata Motors, Aditya Birla Group, Birla Capital, Hotstar, Sony, Future Group, Ashok Leyland, Brigade Group, Kent RO, and HDFC Life — they are all on AWS. And the list continues. The growth in the number of workloads that enterprises are starting to move to the cloud, including mission critical workloads like SAP, is the next phase.
