Share to lead the transformation

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has committed US $2.77 billion (INR 20,761 Crores) to strengthen its cloud infrastructure services in India. Amazon’s cloud computing arm will use this money to launch a new cluster of data centers in Telangana, Hyderabad.

“Happy to announce the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the history of Telangana! After a series of meetings, AWS has finalized an investment of Rs 207.61 bn ($ 2.77 bn) to set up multiple data centers in Telangana. The @AWSCloud Hyderabad Region is expected to be launched by mid-2022,” tweeted Telangana state minister for information technology and industries, KT Rama Rao (KTR).

Within its lexicon, AWS identifies its data centers cluster as Availability Zones. AWS set-up two data centers in Mumbai in 2016. It added another data center in Mumbai last year. Across the Asia Pacific, AWS already has 26 Availability Zones spanning India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

The investment will further enable AWS’s position as a leader in India. AWS currently has around 30% market share of India’s cloud service market, followed by Microsoft’s Azure.

AWS leases server space and bandwidth to enterprises of all sizes with cloud computing capabilities. This allows businesses to accelerate their digital transformation goals without building up their in-house servers or data centers.

Growing cloud services market in India

Over the last few years, Indian enterprises are quickly embracing cloud computing services to upsurge agility, deliver innovations, and modernize their infrastructure. With businesses focusing on well-carved out cloud strategy in the wake of the digital transformation rush, there is a bigger emphasis on getting experts on-board who have the experience to help organizations prepare for a new tomorrow. (See: Bharti Airtel gears up for digital transformation opportunities and IBM to split into two companies for better cloud opportunity)

The pandemic-induced work-from-environment has made the market even more lucrative, and cloud players are taking strong initiatives to strengthen their presence in India. These fast-evolving dynamics have made India one of the biggest and fastest-growing cloud services markets in the Asia Pacific, which is likely to touch $10 billion in another five years. Industry body NASSCOM projects that the market will grow to $7.1 billion by even 2022. (See: Technology trends for businesses in 2020)

The top players dominating the Indian market include Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google Cloud, and Nutanix. Amongst all, Amazon and Microsoft are leading the market and intensely vying to be the market leader in India’s cloud services market. While AWS’s position at the top is indisputable, both Azure and Google are growing at a remarkable rate, posing a threat to Amazon’s dominance in the cloud services space.

Early this year, Amazon and Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecom player, entered into a strategic collaboration to deliver cloud computing solutions to enterprises. The partnership was formed to combat a similar engagement announced by Microsoft and Reliance Jio to provide enterprise cloud solutions powered by Microsoft Azure.

AWS had the first-mover advantage as it started its operations seven years earlier than many of its competitors. It gave Amazon an opportunity to get its offerings tested and make it more functionally rich as compared to the others.

In August 2019, Amazon inaugurated its biggest campus globally in Hyderabad, which supports 15000 employees. Through its AWS Academy and AWS Educate initiatives, AWS has also been providing ready-to-teach curriculum to higher universities in India to upskill local developers, students young IT professionals.

AWS’s client in India includes Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and several others.

AWS registered a 29% year-on-year growth in revenue to posting $10.8 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2020.

Climate Change: Javadekar takes charge

Prakash Javadekar today assumed charge as the Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change here today. He was greeted at the office at Paryavaran Bhawan by Environment Secretary Shri C K Mishra and other senior officials of the ministry. Babul Supriyo also assumed charge as Minister of State.

Briefing the media after assuming the charge, the Union Minister said it is like a home coming for him as he already served in the ministry for two years in the first term of NDA government. He stressed that we will strongly reinforce that this ministry is seen as a facilitator and not merely as a regulator. “Economic growth and environment protection should go simultaneously, and we need to work with an increased impetus towards that”, said Javadekar.

After assuming the charge, the Minister also held a meeting with the senior officers of the Ministry where he was briefed on the key initiatives and policy issues of the Ministry.

Infosys Foundation Opens Aarohan Awards 2019

The awards would recognize solutions that could positively impact the underprivileged in India. (Representative image)

Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic and CSR arm of Infosys, has announced the launch of the second edition of the Aarohan Social Innovation Awards. The award is aimed at accelerating innovation in the social sector. The Aarohan Social Innovation Awards 2019 seek to recognize and reward individuals, teams or NGOs developing unique solutions that have the potential to positively impact the underprivileged in India, at scale.

Speaking at the launch of the second edition of the awards, Infosys Foundation Chairperson Sudha Murty said, “The Aarohan Social Innovation Awards 2018 was a huge success. Infosys Foundation witnessed a very good response from social innovators across the country and eventually, 12 leading innovators were recognised and awarded. The overwhelming response we got last year, has reaffirmed my belief that there are innumerable innovators across India who are looking up to this platform to give wings to their passion by scaling their innovation and impacting millions of lives. With the second edition of the awards, we hope to discover these hidden social innovators across the country and help them scale the power of their social innovations”

The awards will accept submissions across six categories, namely, Healthcare, Rural Development, Destitute Care, Women’s Safety & Empowerment, Education & Sports, and Sustainability.

The submission process for the second edition of these awards commences on July 15, 2019 and will continue till September 30, 2019. Participants can submit entries describing their work in the form of videos that can be uploaded on the Aarohan Social Innovation Awards website. The entries must be of a fully functioning prototype, not just a concept, idea or mock up. Additionally, the project must not be an established commercial venture.

Aarohan Social Innovation Awards will also offer winners an opportunity for residential technical mentorship at the IIT Hyderabad campus for up to 12 weeks to help them further develop and scale their solutions.

A panel of distinguished judges will evaluate and select the winners whose submissions will be assessed on five broad criteria – application to a social problem or need, innovative use of technology, originality of ideas, ease of use and the quality of presentation. The jury will comprise Prof. Trilochan Sastry, former Dean, IIM Bangalore; Padma Shree Arvind Gupta, an Indian toy inventor and science expert; Prof. Anil Gupta, visiting faculty member, IIM Ahmedabad, a globally renowned scholar of grassroots innovations and founder of the Honey Bee Network; Prof. GVV Sharma, Faculty member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Coordinator, Teaching Learning Centre, IIT Hyderabad; Sumit Virmani, Senior Vice President and Global Head – Marketing, Infosys, and Infosys Foundation Chairperson, renowned author and philanthropist Sudha Murty.

AWS pumps $2.77 bn in India to retain cloud supremacy

Climate Change: Javadekar takes charge

Infosys Foundation Opens Aarohan Awards 2019

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