BENGALURU: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is regarded as among the pioneers of cloud computing. In India, it is a big hit particularly with startups because of the ease with which it allows them to access computing resources. Adam Selipsky, VP for sales, marketing and support at AWS, was in Bengaluru recently where he talked to TOI about enterprise adoption of cloud and AWS’ expansion in India.

How do you see enterprise movement to the cloud in India compared to that elsewhere.
There’s rapid movement of enterprises to the cloud everywhere. US got on to the cloud a little bit earlier. Australia too moved pretty quickly and many large banks there are deeply deployed on AWS. India is very much mainstream now in terms of enterprises understanding the process, the value addition of cloud, mapping up migration strategies.

The conversation about cloud has now shifted remarkably from why, to how and what. Tata Motors have moved its web portals, and its FleetMan application — that helps truck owners to manage their fleet — to AWS. The Apeejay Stya & Svran Group have moved all of their IT to Amazon; it’s almost a server-less office for them now.

How many customers do you have in India?
We have 12,000.

Can you break that up into startups, SMEs and large enterprises?
We don’t breakup like that as it is blurry. For instance, Netflix has been on AWS from the beginning and do you call them a startup anymore? Hungama is a successful startup from India but which cannot be called a startup anymore. AirBnb, Pinterest and RedBus are a few startups that grew with us.

Do you have plans to build a data centre in India?
I definitely believe we will have AWS infrastructure here, but we don’t have a particular plan or timing to talk about. We already have a presence here with our content delivery service CloudFront; it has a two-point presence in Mumbai and Chennai. It is managed by a third party but built and run to our specifications including durability and security.
Amazon gives free credits, but using those credits requires credit cards. This is a problem for student entrepreneurs in India because banks don’t give them credit cards. Is there something you could do? Payments and billings are an important area and we will enable other payment methods over time, particularly local payment methods. We have partners and resellers in India who will do debit cards or cash. We have an “activate programme” for students that include support forums and trainings.

Tell us about your hiring plans in India.
We are scaling rapidly in India given the growth here. We have centres in 5-6 cities. The kind of people we have here are account managers, solution architects (creating solutions for customers), business development specialists, partner alliance managers, trainers, professional services (to accelerate migration to cloud), and support staff. We don’t do any fundamental R&D here.

Source: Times of India