Indian enterprises going whole hog on Cloud adoption: AWS

By Nishant Arora

Mumbai, May 14 (IANS) India has just started to see a significant Cloud adoption by the enterprises and the Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of retail giant Amazon, is fast bringing in new services and capabilities to help both the existing customer base and new customers solve all sorts of fresh problems deliver enhanced experiences, a top company executive said here on Tuesday.

The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones in 2016 and has seen stupendous growth in adding new customers in the region.

"Over the last few years, we have brought an ever-expanding set of capabilities to our customers in India across industries - enterprises, governments and start-ups.

"In areas like Machine Learning (ML), data analytics, edge computing, services and so on, there's still so much to do and we are right on it. There are still so many new opportunities for us to help organisations leverage the power of AWS Cloud," Ed Lenta, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, AWS, told IANS.

The Indian enterprises -- be it banking, insurance, e-commerce - are fast adopting Public Cloud and AWS platforms based on certain New-Age mantras that are adhering to.

"The first thing is a bold and compelling vision and a senior executive within that company who not only subscribes to that vision but also understands the importance of technology in that vision," said Lenta on the sidelines of the two-day AWS India Summit here that kicked off on Tuesday.

Next is to accept new organisational structures, build modern teams and adopt modern technology and architecture to support all of that.

"I would say that more and more, I'm starting to see that here in the Indian context," noted Lenta who manages AWS operations across more than 20 countries.

AWS saw sales surge 41 per cent from the prior year to $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2019. AWS accounted for about 13 per cent of Amazon's total revenue for the quarter and Asia-Pacific market is the next big engine of growth for the company.

"As you witness an increased enterprise adoption across India, our partners in the country are going to be massively important constituents for us," said Lenta.

On a question about data residency concerns among Indian enterprises, he said that wherever we deploy our infrastructure, we allow customers to own their data.

"To make the decision about where their data is going to reside, that's been something been consistently important to us and our customers. You're not going to see any change in that from AWS. Customers own the data along with the right where it has to be stored.

"In our Mumbai Cloud region, customers are in full control of whether they decided to have their data to reside in India or not. That's a great choice for them to have," Lenta told IANS.

AWS has been investing in India for a long time now. Today, AWS Cloud is being used by several active customers for various applications, including website hosting, big data analytics, ML/AI, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile applications and run mission-critical business applications.

The AWS customers' list includes HDFC Life, Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Finance, MakeMyTrip, redBus, L&T Infotech and several others.

"We are in India for an extremely long term. We are addressing all market segments here -- irrespective of whether you're thinking about the enterprise market, the government market or even startups where we see the investment from venture capitalists and angel investors is actually increasing year over year in the country," Lenta emphasised.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)