Amazon’s Next Data Centres Show Importance Of The Indian Subcontinent

Amazon has this week revealed plans to open data centres in India, confirming that the region will be its twelfth globally.

The data centres, which will run Amazon’s cloud computing platform AWS, will open in 2016.

“Largest regions”

Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services’ SVP, said that India will be one of Amazon cloud’s “largest regions” in the long term.

“Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India,” said Jassy.

“We’re excited to share that Indian customers will be able to use the world’s leading cloud computing platform (AWS) in India in 2016.”

And Amazon has some big names as customers in India. Indian giants such as Tata Motors and Jubilant Food Works use AWS to power their computing for millions of their own customers. Amazon said that Tata Motors, which is one of India’s largest automotive manufacturing companies, runs its customer portals and telematics systems on AWS Cloud, allowing fleet owners to monitor all the vehicles in their fleet on a real-time basis.

Other big name clients include Hike, PayTM, ZEDO, Freshdesk, Inmobi, Capillary Technologies, HackerEarth, Getit, Ferns N Petals, and redBus.

Rivals

But Amazon won’t be going it alone in the country. Microsoft also revealed plans earlier this year to build data centres in India, offering its cloud platform Azure and Office 365.

IBM has also stepped up its game in India, with its hybrid cloud platform largely orientated towards the enterprise sector.

Research firm Gartner predicts that public cloud services revenue in India will reach $838 million by the end of 2015, an increase of almost 33 percent, or $206 million over 2014 revenue of $632 million.

“Organisations in India seeking IT outsourcing services are increasingly turning to public cloud services as an alternative to traditional ITO offerings,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. “In fact, cloud services are not only being used for low-value or transient workloads but also increasingly for production workloads, including some mission-critical initiatives.”

Take our cloud quiz here!