India in the middle of a perfect digitization storm: Puneet Chandok, AWS

In 2016, when AWS launched its first India cloud region in Mumbai to expand its offerings in the country, few could have imagined the scale of Covid-19 induced digital acceleration across companies.  

Puneet Chandok, President of AWS India, believes India is now in the middle of a perfect storm of digitization due to the number of businesses—of all sizes – moving workloads to the cloud. Chandok was speaking at the virtual Amazon Summit India. The two-day event kicked off on Tuesday. 

The presence of businesses transitioning to cloud, software as a service (SaaS) startups moving to fill the demand for digital services and ambitious projects such as India stack have created an ecosystem conducive to cloud growth.  

The India Stack is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) which allow different participants such as the government, businesses, startups and developers to work together on a single digital infrastructure. The Stack is seen as a move towards presence-less, paperless and cashless services.   

“You can now literally build a business from anywhere – ideate, hire, train, collaborate, sell, deliver and support virtually,” Chandok said. 

According to Chandok, there is a clear sense of urgency in digital roadmaps as projects that used to be implemented over several quarters or even years are now being deployed in weeks.   

For AWS, it is the smaller businesses that are opening new channels of growth. “Small to Medium Business (SMBs) are core to our mission in India. We are now seeing a generation of digital SMBs that are building on AWS,” he said. 

Read: AWS launches Amazon Digital Suite to digitise SMBs

In July 2020, India’s SaaS revenue had hit $3.5 billon, growing at 30% annually, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). 

In April this year, NASSCOM also estimated that the Indian technology services industry could touch $300-$350 billion in annual revenues by 2025. 

In his keynote address, the AWS president also spoke about successful case studies in India. For Ashok Leyland, AWS built a platform that helped the heavy vehicles manufacturer to improve data processing by 300%, with 40% reduction in costs. 

Other examples include helping agritech startup CropIn increase surveillance for 6.1 million acres of land, and aiding fantasy sports platform Dream 11 scale up from 2 million users in 2016 to 100 million users currently.   

The AWS Summit India is part of Amazon’s global Summit Program targeted at the cloud computing community.