#Amazon to start data centres in #India
Amazon to start data centres in India in 2016 with an investment of many millions of dollars, ‘Andy Jassy’, the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) told TOI in an elite interface.
Jassy said that the investment could scale to billions of the dollars as region grows. It is very important investment for us. We have developed very, very quickly in India. At this point we have the tens of thousands of active customers in India, across ventures, small to medium size businesses, and startups.
AWS is pioneer in cloud infrastructure services & is the world’s largest in the space, with proceeds expected to be $6.2 billion in 2015, out of Amazon’s overall revenue of over $90 billion (most of the revenues now come from e-commerce business, but AWS is growing at 40 to 50% annually). Research firm Synergy estimates that AWS’s revenue from cloud infrastructure services in first quarter of this year was larger than the mutual revenue of its 4 main competitors – IBM, Microsoft, Google & Salesforce.
Cloud services allow businesses to distribute with purchasing costly computing infrastructure & software licenses – as also prevent the require to operate & maintain them – and as an alternative get everything essential from the service provider by paying the rental fee.
AWS’s announcement comes within the months of Microsoft announcing that it would commercialize 3 data centres in India by end of this year. From the beginning of July, customers would be able to do private previews of the infrastructure services, which it calls Azure. By next year, it will also offer the cloud version of its productivity suite, called Office 365, & cloud CRM (customer relationship management). IBM started a data centre in the city Mumbai offering cloud services late last year and a second is expected to be ready later this year.
This big rush to establish data centres in India is partly a indication of dramatic shift to cloud computing, the Digital India proposals of the government, and the require, particularly of banking & financial services & government departments, to keep data within the geographic boundaries of India. In Amazon’s case, Indian users mostly use its Singapore data centre now. An India centre would also decrease latency – the time it takes to obtain data.
AWS’s customers in India comprise enterprises like Tata Motors, Future Group, Macmillan India, Manipal Global Education, & small enterprises and startups like Paytm, Capillary Technologies, redBus, Freshdesk, InMobi, HackerEarth, Hike & Ferns N Petals.
Ferns N Petals, which sells flowers & gifting items, moved entirely to AWS cloud early last year. Manish Saini, VP of online business for Ferns N Petals, said the move has helped to manage the peaks on Valentine’s Day, Rakshabandhan, Mother’s Day and Diwali. They do not have to buy infrastructure that will be used only a few days in the year. We can just rent capacity from AWS when we expect peaks.
Tata Motors customer portals and its telematics systems, which lets fleet owners monitor all the vehicles in their fleet on the real time basis, are running on the AWS cloud. Jagdish Belwal, CIO of Tata Motors told TOI that AWS had helped the organization become more agile & it has radically improved our speed of experimentation and therefore, innovation. An India data centre, would lead to many more companies adopting cloud.
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