AWS Summit India 2017: A Report

Amazon Web Services (AWS) organized India summits in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore during May to reach out to new and experienced users of cloud. The objective was to educate the market about cloud in general and AWS in particular. AWS shared deep technical content with existing customers to help them become more successful using AWS infrastructure.

The Summits were well attended by developers and business leaders from across verticals, reflecting the tremendous momentum in the acceptance and adoption of AWS cloud. Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer, Amazon.com announced the latest innovations in the AWS Cloud and explained how businesses can take advantage and lead with AWS Cloud.

India is a very important market to AWS, growing at a very rapid pace with over 12,000 customers. AWS customer in India received a significant boost with the launch of the data centre in India, registering over 50 percent growth.

Popular AWS workloads for customers in India include website hosting, big data analytics, social games, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, disaster recovery, mission-critical business applications such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Sharepoint, and start-ups launching new and  innovative businesses on AWS.

Bikram Singh Bedi, head of India region, Amazon Web Services said there is fast adoption of AWS services across India amongst developers, start-ups, small-to-mid sized companies, enterprises and education institutions. “Cloud is the new normal. We are witnessing adoption of AWS across the board with different kinds of workloads.”

AWS customers include Tata Motors, NDTV, Macmillan India, Eros International, Ramco, Apeejay Stya and Svran Group, Living Media, Malayala Manorama among others. SMBs include Ferns N Petals, BookMyShow, Hungama, InMobi, redbus, vServ.Mobi, and start-ups include Hike, Hotelogix, Mindtickle, Zipdial, HackerEarth, Classle. Some customers such as Hungama has been AWS customers for more than nine years.

Dr Vogels was positive about AWS prospects in the India market. According to Dr Vogels, a significant portion of Amazon’s profit comes out of AWS, and India is a pretty substantial part of the revenue. India is an important country from consumer point of view and independent software vendors point of view. A lot of software as a service is being created in India.

“A lot of digital innovation is happening in India—with a large customer base and a very healthy ecosystem. I think the push by the government on digital will drive digital consumption.”

Speaking about the future of technology innovation, Dr Vogels said, “Voice is going to be one of the main interfaces in the way consumers will consume digital services in the future and Amazon is making significant investments to make it possible for humans to interact with computers via voice commands.”

A key message from Dr Vogels is AWS has evolved and is more than an infrastructure company. Today AWS offers more than 90 services in areas such as analytics, artificial intelligence, mobility, data warehousing—enabling customers to achieve complex tasks easily and cost-effectively.

Umbrella at AWS Summit

Umbrella was the gold sponsor of the AWS Summit in Delhi. Nishant Sharma, CTO, Umbrella Infocare spoke at the Summit.

Providing an overview of Umbrella, Sharma said the company wanted to graduate to premier consulting partner from the current status of advance consulting partner. With more than 125 deployments, Umbrella has more than 50 managed services clients and was working towards being certified as a Managed Services Partner this year. Key areas of focus is DevOps and automation in migration and managed services

Outlining the main reasons for adopting AWS Cloud, Sharma said agility and productivity were the key drivers. Data center consolidation, digital transformation and cost reduction were other drivers to adopt AWS cloud.

Some of the reasons why AWS has established as a preferred cloud vendor include: breadth and depth of AWS service offerings; the security and compliance that AWS cloud infrastructure offers. The multiple ways of connecting to the AWS cloud which includes site-to-site VPN services and Direct Connect services which allows enterprises to work in a hybrid environment and take advantage of AWS as an extended data center.