Even as the competition becomes tougher with Microsoft and Google making inroads into its marketshare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud service of Amazon.com, continues to be the leading choice of small and medium businesses (SMBs) and start-ups. Contrary to popular belief, the company has had many clients from traditional industries including oil and gas, says Werner Vogels, vice-president and chief technology officer of Amazon. In a conversation with Anand J, he speaks about the Indian market. Edited excerpts:
On being in India for more than 10 days at a stretch and specific plans for Amazon?s
India operations.
It is 14 days actually. I come every year. We have some events related to our cloud services, AWS, which more than 9,000 people have signed up to attend. India is a very important market to us. We are making sure that our customers have the best possible computing infrastructure at their fingertips at the lowest possible cost with the highest reliability. It is a very healthy business and growing at a very healthy rate. We have customers in retail, media, advertisement,
financial services and so on. India also has a healthy technology business and many of our partners here are building products and platforms like Wipro, Infosys etc. They use our services in the region for software development but also to service products and customers worldwide through us. That is also true of large system integrators.
On the Indian clients and how they use the service.
E-commerce operators like Snapdeal, Bookmyshow, travel companies, Future Group are all building their business on top of AWS. They are using us for analytics, how to target customers, advertisement, how to search content, and operations and management. Media houses like Tata Sky, Sony Entertainment, NDTV make use of us; so do streaming companies like Eros Entertainment and Hungama. Rediff was one of our early customers. Quite a few are building their mobile platform on us. In the mobile space, Inmobi and many advertisement providers work with us. Even some traditional companies like the RPG Group is using us for human resource management and has made great improvements in infrastructure and its time to market has
improved by 80%.
On how the competition is shaping up as Microsoft is offering Office 365 as a service and its cloud service Azure has crossed $1 billion in revenues while Google Apps has slashed the rates in India by half.
We always knew that this is not a winner-takes-all and there will be competition. We knew this would be substantial business, almost of the same magnitude as our retail business. They are really in the
application domain and our offering is quite different from the products you mentioned. What we
deliver is computing space, date storage, basic building blocks that companies use to build own products or for other organisations.
On the difference between Indian market and the Western market.
What makes India different is an extremely healthy SMB market. In these companies an IT guy will come once in a week to install and maintain software and computers. What we are seeing is software being delivered as a service rather than pre-installed. Software that was available only to enterprises is now available to all of these startups. Financing history or
accounting as a service are things every company would like to do. SMBs could not have availed these services earlier.
On its recent efforts to acquire large clients, apart from SMBs.
When we launched the service seven years ago, within months we got big corporations and it is wrong to say that we focus on SMBs and startups. We have always catered to large enterprises in financial services. Oil and gas companies have also been one of the earliest customers. Some of our younger businesses have had spectacular growth due to AWS.
On providing analytics on top of the cloud service.
These days the big data approach is driven by analytics. It is more than analytics; how you get the data, store and manage the data, quality control of the data, merge different data and so on. Cloud computing is the ideal model for big data analytics. Many of the young businesses will be using the tool on top of the platform to be able to do the analytics. Bookmyshow makes use of Amazon RedShift that is a data warehouse solution.
On how clients are driving down costs.
We are providing a tool called Trusted Advisor that inspects your infrastructure and suggests how you could improve your security, reliability and cost effectiveness. It helped Hungama drop the AWS bill by a third this year. This we do with all our customers and give them suggestions based on their architecture. That is not what a typical software vendor does.
On diversifying the server locations after the recent crash of servers used by Netflix.
Within the eastern region of the US where we encountered the problem, there are five different availability zones. We have nine regions around the world and in each of these regions what we guarantee is that if you move data into that region, content will never be moved out of that region. Each region will consist of at least two availability zones. And if the customers make use of these availability zones they can build architecture for all circumstances.