Jassy said the investment could scale to billions of dollars as the region grows. "It is a very significant investment for us. We have grown very, very quickly in India. At this point we have tens of thousands of active customers in India, across enterprises, small to medium size businesses, and startups," he said.
AWS is the pioneer in cloud infrastructure services and is the world's largest in the space, with revenue expected to be $6.2 billion in 2015, out of Amazon's overall revenue of over $90 billion (most revenues now come from the e-commerce business, but AWS is growing at 40-50% annually). Research firm Synergy estimates that AWS's revenue from cloud infrastructure services in the first quarter of this year was larger than the combined revenue of its four main competitors - IBM, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.
Cloud services allow businesses to dispense with purchasing expensive computing infrastructure and software licenses - as also obviate the need to operate and maintain them - and instead obtain everything necessary from the service provider by paying a rental fee.
AWS's announcement comes within months of Microsoft announcing that it would commercialize three data centres in India by the end of this year. From the beginning of July, customers will be able to do private previews of infrastructure services, which it calls Azure. By next year, it will also offer the cloud version of its productivity suite, called Office 365, and cloud CRM (customer relationship management). IBM established a data centre in Mumbai offering cloud services late last year and a second is expected to be ready later this year.
This big rush to establish data centres in India is partly a reflection of the dramatic shift to cloud computing, the Digital India initiatives of the government, and the need, especially of banking & financial services and government departments, to keep data within the geographic boundaries of India. In Amazon's case, Indian users mostly use its Singapore data centre now. An India centre will also reduce latency - the time it takes to fetch data.
AWS's customers in India include enterprises like Tata Motors, Future Group, Macmillan India, Manipal Global Education, and small enterprises and startups like Paytm, Freshdesk, InMobi , HackerEarth, Capillary Technologies, redBus, Hike and Ferns N Petals.
Ferns N Petals, which sells flowers and gifting items, moved entirely to the AWS cloud early last year. Manish Saini, VP of online business for Ferns N Petals, said the move has helped to manage the peaks on Valentine's Day, Rakshabandhan, Mother's Day and Diwali. "We don't have to buy infrastructure that will be used only a few days in the year. We can just rent capacity from AWS when we expect peaks," he says.
Tata Motors customer portals and its telematics systems, which lets fleet owners monitor all the vehicles in their fleet on a real time basis, are running on the AWS cloud. Jagdish Belwal, CIO of Tata Motors told TOI that AWS had helped the organization become more agile and "it has drastically increased our speed of experimentation and therefore, innovation." An India data centre, he said, would lead to many more companies adopting cloud.
AMAZON & INDIA
Amazon revenue: $89 billion (in 2014)
Amazon Web Services revenue: $4.6 billion (in 2014), $6.2 billion (expected in 2015)
AWS revenue larger than combined revenue of four main competitors - IBM, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.
AWS used in high profile projects like Nasa's Mars Rover. It won a prestigious deal from CIA two years ago, beating IBM.
India will be AWS's 12th region to host its infrastructure.
Active AWS customers in India: over 12,000
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