In May 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed its commitment of $12.7 billion to India’s local cloud infrastructure by 2030, raising its total investment in the country to ₹1,36,500 crores by then. Chris Casey, Head of Partner Management, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS, talks to businessline about developing a strong partner ecosystem in India and the company’s intention to support the digital transformation of the Indian economy.
How significant is India as a geography for AWS?
AWS opened its first office in India in 2011. Over the past decades, we’ve made significant investments in India, both for the commercial and local government and public sectors. That includes building our team and the cloud infrastructure in India. We announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in India by 2030 into our local cloud infrastructure. Between 2016-2022, AWS invested $3.71 billion in India. This includes capital and operating expenditures associated with constructing, maintaining, and operating the data centres in the region. This investment contributed an estimated $4.6 billion to India’s GDP and supported an average of 39,500 full-time jobs with local businesses.
AWS’s total investment in India, by 2030, will be ₹1,36,500 crores or $16.4 billion. Our planned investment will contribute $23.3 billion to India’s GDP by 2030, and support approximately 1,31,700 full-time jobs annually at local businesses.
We approach partnerships differently from traditional tech companies by working backward from what customers need and working with a cohort of partners to deliver high-quality solutions and outcomes to serve those joint customers.
This includes some infrastructure AWS has with our regions in India, but also the partner network spanning the full gamut - from startup, and ISV partners, to consulting partners like PwC, partners who do cloud consulting, and systems integrations in the case of a partner like Minfy, all the way through to a partner like Noventiq, specialising in digital transformation and cybersecurity. Along with a partner like Rapyder, a cloud consulting company, we have a “strategic collaboration agreement” with all three, designed to drive non-linear growth with them and transformation with our customers.
You mentioned investing around $16.4 billion in the country for digital infrastructure development. What are some capabilities you want to expand?
A bulk of it is to continue to focus on bringing our services to market in India. We launched Amazon Bedrock in India in May this year and we will innovate quickly in that space. We also look to double down on our existing partnerships in India, whether with emerging cloud consulting partners, like in the case of Rapyder and Minfy, as well as with Noventiq, and some larger global technology companies.
With Minfy, a premier AWS Partner and cloud native systems integrator, we announced a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) to deepen their use of cloud services and AI. The SCA will support $500 million in overall business growth through international expansion over the next four years. Under this multi-year agreement, Minfy will help enterprises across multiple industries worldwide leverage AI and cloud technologies to deliver new solutions, like the Swayam.ai GenAI app store. It plans to further expansion in the U.S., Australia, Malaysia and the Philippines with AWS.
We have a partnership with HCLTechnologies and they’re doing a lot across our GenAI portfolio including training over 50,000 HCL Tech engineers on Amazon Q for developers. We did an IBM Client Experience Center in Bangalore, which includes an innovation lab. The place is open to mutual customers from around the world to come to India to look at joint solutions from IBM and AWS in terms of testing prototypes and proof of concept to accelerate and ideate.
What parameters do you consider when you approach companies for partnerships?
We look at partners oriented around customers, focusing on delivering outcomes as fast as possible. We then work with these partners to build new capabilities, like in the case of new technologies like GenAI. In the case of Noventiq, they’ve been doing digital transformation and cybersecurity for some time. We saw an opportunity with them in financial services, manufacturing, media, and entertainment, to help partners with accelerating end-customer migrations to the cloud. In collaboration with Noventiq alone, we intend to migrate over 1,000 customers from on premises infrastructures to AWS by 2027.
Globally, how significant is the India market concerning partnerships?
We remain bullish on the opportunity to impact and help with the digital transformation of the Indian economy and businesses here. India is a strategic growth area for AWS. For example, GenAI, a new technology, will play a key growth lever for economies and can contribute to the growth of individual economies.
In India, we’ve observed companies don’t only look at the technology, but also have a strategy around the talent and skills they need to leverage that technology, look at data governance, at responsible AI practices, and then choose a cloud or a technology provider to embark on this journey. AWS’ GenAI strategy has been clear that customers can bring their models to their proprietary data on AWS instead of moving the data into the model. That means no customer data is used to train an underlying model. These things can be differentiators for customers in India and APJ and worldwide as to why they’re looking at AWS and our partners as the cloud of choice for them to push forward on this new technology.
What kind of organisations in India do you look at, among the public sector, larger enterprises or smaller businesses and start-ups?
There are different priorities in each area and the enterprise space, financial services, manufacturing, media, and entertainment, are big focuses of many partnerships.
Alongside, we continue to accelerate digital transformation for enterprises and public sector companies in India, especially with the mission we have to help transform it into a digital economy. Startups and small and medium businesses are also fascinating. Several interesting startups in India are consulting or software companies building technology where they’re looking to partner with AWS to continue to help grow their business. Shellkode and Yellow.ai are good examples of smaller companies and startups capitalising on the AWS partner network to bring their solutions to market and help differentiate themselves.
What benefits do your partners see by collaborating with AWS? How many partners do you work with?
We have over 100,000 partners at AWS overall. Most benefits are around the speed of innovation, speed to market and then helping them potentially reduce the upfront cost of building a new capability or training their workforce. AWS works with many local businesses through the AWS Partner Network (APN), the global partner program for technology and consulting businesses that leverage AWS to build solutions and services for AWS customers. APN helps companies build, market, and sell their AWS offerings by providing valuable business, technical, and marketing support.