The Success Story of Amazon Web Services in India

At the recently held Amazon Partners Summit Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO - Amazon.com spoke about how AWS is helpful for the growth of start-up companies and that AWS (Amazon Web Services) has now a robust, fully featured technology Infrastructure platform. He further validated to say that 90% of the start-ups in the country are running in the AWS platform and shared about some of the best success stories of AWS that came come from the collaboration of people in that room.

Thousands of attendees gathered at the Mumbai Summit.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) program helps partners build successful AWS-based businesses, by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) support. AWS Consulting Partners such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Accenture, PwC, Blazeclan, Minjar, Frontier, Intelligrape, Progressive, and Team Computers are helping enterprises migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications on AWS, and are providing a full range of monitoring, automation and management services for customers’ AWS environments.

AWS Technology Partners in India include SAP, Microsoft, Adobe, Druva, Freshdesk, Manthan, Indusface, Newgen, RAMCO, Seclore, Mediology, Mithi Software, Vinculum, and many others who are providing software solutions that are either hosted on, or integrated with AWS. The AWS is the marketplace where customers can easily find, trial, deploy, and buy software solutions from the AWS Cloud. Enterprises and SMBs in India like working with/buying from the local partners they know, and the local AWS partner ecosystem provides a great on ramp to the cloud and deliver the confidence they need to migrate more workloads.

"In India, the number of AWS Professional Level certifications grew 1036% year-over-year in 2016, and the number of AWS Associate Level certifications grew 323% year-over-year in 2016”

AWS’s highly reliable and resilient cloud platform gives freedom to ISVs to build and deploy their products around AWS eco-system with increased efficiency, instant service delivery, accelerated growth, enhanced scalability, high availability and reduced CAPEX. Some examples below –

Vinculum is an Advanced Technology Partner of AWS and leveraging the platform capabilities they have built integrations to marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart etc, 3PLs like Blue Dart, Ecom Express, Delhivery, Front end platforms, Cross border platforms which facilitate brands and retailers to sell orders in 65 plus countries from India itself along with end to end visibility, tracking and deliveries. Their flagship product VineRetail has helped many hundreds of brands and retailers in India to go online and succeed globally.

Mediology Software is India’s leading products company working with media and publishing companies since 2010. In 2012 they launched Readwhere.com, which in a short span of time became India’s leading digital reading platform. They have to their credit, India’s first company to be a finalist in the AWS Start-up challenge, and recently won the Innovation award across the North India Partner Ecosystem. The deep domain expertise in AWS and Media has resulted in their platform being embraced by 2000+ publishers, from over 350 cities in India

Shantanu Mathur, Country Head - Knowlarity is the largest cloud communications provider in emerging markets. Over 15000 businesses across 65+ countries trust Knowlarity's suite of hosted products that make business telephony reliable and intelligent. Knowlarity is backed by Sequoia Capital and Mayfield. One of the early adopters of  Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Dynamo DB, Amazon Lambda and Amazon EMR services and leveraging AWS Cloud has helped accelerate their growth and efficiently scale operations to serve customers globally.

Tarun Malaviya, CEO - Mithi Software Technologies distinguishes itself as a provider of Email, Collaboration and Archiving solutions. The company started by building collaboration solutions on an Open Source Platform around the year 2005, to create affordable collaboration software. About two years ago the company made the choice of moving to the Cloud platform to breakout from this limitation. Moving to AWS has enabled Mithi to bring newer and better offerings to its customers and to innovate faster. The company has recently launched 3 more solutions on AWS including Vaultastic – a cloud based email archiving and backup solution that can be used to archive mails from any mailing system and ClearStream – offering Anti Spam, Anti Virus and Ransomware protection for mail servers as well as a basic disaster recovery to ensure email service continuity in case the primary email server is inaccessible. Lastly, the flexibility, reduced capital costs, improved security, dependability and faster upgrades, that the AWS cloud offering brings is much welcome by Mithi and their customers.

Manthan, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner has been rapidly innovating using AWS services, including Amazon Redshift for increased value delivery to clients by providing high performance at lower costs. By rapidly innovating on AWS, Manthan has built a compelling suite of BI analytics products optimized to Big Data technologies on AWS. With Manthan’s portfolio of cloud based Big Data and Analytics solutions on AWS, including Customer Analytics, Retail Analytics and Supplier collaboration, Manthan aims to bring affordable, ultra-scalable and responsive cloud based analytics closer to businesses. The AWS team engaged with the Manthan team to help transform their solutions and strengthen their cloud strategy on AWS. Atul Batra, CTO - Manthan spoke about the goal of Manthan’s to become the biggest analytics provider on the cloud. “Thanks to the partnership of AWS we are well honoured,” he said.

Terry Wise, Vice president - WW Alliances, Channels and Ecosystem Amazon web services spoke about how the enterprises work for customers. “The AWS platform has been made to work great in areas of specialization with technologies like big data analytics, mobility, IoT, artificial intelligence. We are friendly and work with customers to take the discussion forward,” he said.

The AWS Model is doing really great. There are great opportunities for companies to create enthusiasm and use this technology to innovate. 

“AWS came to India in 2012 and it was the first to sign up to start a cloud journey. The broad investment that amazon.com has done is of $ 5billion. We are going a long way but with a passion. It was another great story or partner transition and delivering to your web service and solutions on the cloud with AWS and specifying driving innovation. With the business growing tremendously year on year, we have grown on a very big scale,” concluded Terry Wise.

Channels to drive cloud adoption in India...

“The number of enterprises utilizing AWS services since the time it first set up shop in the country has gone up substantially, especially after the launch of their local datacenter in Mumbai in June 2016. AWS has been aggressive on building its global partner program for the past couple of years. Our USP of success is to listen to customers, build partner ecosystem and enable skillsets on cloud,” says Bikram S Bedi, Managing Director & Head of India - Amazon Internet Services.

“We witnessed an 80% increase in the number of partners who joined APN in India from June 2015 to June 2016. The reseller revenues have seen triple digit growth in India as we foresee huge traction across the market with massive opportunities for the channels,” he added. “The focus is to continue to work closely with ‘born in the cloud’ partners. We would dive much deeper with consulting partners, large global system integrators like Accenture, PwC, HCL, Wipro, TCS and also regional systems integrator partners like Progressive, Team Computers, Orient technologies, to name a few.

With businesses embarking on a cloud transformation journey, IT teams have started facing issues related to business requirement and to deliver new functionalities in applications faster. To address this partner segment, AWS signed Redington as its first India distributor last year. The distributor for cloud is the new model in the marketplace and we are not scared to walk down the dark alleys. We believe to be successful and distribution has to be conquered in a meaningful way and we are figuring out the distribution piece to enable our channel ecosystem. That’s the first initiative to go deeper in alliance with partners, like working on analytics with Progressive or working with other partners on archiving and storage as services. We will invest on partners, build skillsets and forge deeper relationships with them,” he said.

(Bikram leads the team in India that helps businesses of all sizes to learn about AWS and implement the cloud computing platform, enabling them to save money, accelerate their time to market, and focus on their core business. Bikram has over 20 years of experience, including managing various businesses in senior leadership roles across ASEAN, Asia Pacific and India geographies for various IT and Telecom-companies. Prior to joining Amazon Web Services, Bikram was the VP of the middleware business at Oracle India.)