Who will benefit from AWS’s India infrastructure region?

SEATTLE: Following the heels of close rival Microsoft which announced $5 billion investment for 3 data centers in India, Amazon Web Services has announced that it is opening an infrastructure region in India for its cloud computing platform in 2016.

According to AWS, customers include Hike, PayTM, ZEDO, Freshdesk, Inmobi, Capillary Technologies, HackerEarth, Getit, Ferns N Petals, redBus, Druva, Vserv, Hungama, Tata Motors, Jubilant Food Works, STAR India, Future Group, Manipal Global Education, Classle, NDTV, Dalmia Bharat Sugar, Usha International, Macmillan India, Apeejay Stya and Svran Group who are using its platform to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, speed time-to-market, and expand geographic reach. And there are many more who will benefit from the new infrastructure.

We detail some use cases:

Tata Motors: Tata Motor’s 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.

Tata Motors recently built a parts planning system to forecast spares demand by using ordering and inventory patterns. They use AWS for development landscapes immediately after the project kicks off, which shaves four to six weeks of setup time in a typical project cycle.

“Whenever we plan on rolling out a new project or experimenting with a new technology, AWS helps us in quickly provisioning the required infrastructure and enables us in getting up and running at a fast pace,” said Jagdish Belwal, Chief Information Officer, Tata Motors.

NDTV: NDTV has been using AWS since 2009 to run their video platform and all their Web properties. During the May 2014 general election, NDTV was able to handle the unprecedented Web traffic that scaled 26 times from 500 million hits on a normal day to 13 billion hits on the day of the election, including the peak 400,000 hits per second.

“We have been an early adopter of AWS and the benefits are beyond just cost savings. It is the agility that enables us to move fast with new projects that makes a positive impact and real difference to our business,” said Kawaljit Singh, CTO, NDTV Convergence.

“We are very impressed with the staff and tech support teams of AWS, who have been most helpful in providing support and guidance throughout our cloud journey. They worked hand-in-hand with our team so that we are able to handle the massive scale and unpredictability of workloads for the general election event last year, and as a result, the entire process took place without any hitch at all,” he added.

Ferns N Petals: Prior to using AWS, Ferns N Petals was running its IT infrastructure in a traditional data center. They turned to AWS in 2014 when their business grew rapidly and decided to move their entire online business to AWS.

Since moving to AWS, they are able to manage rapid growth of their user traffic that peaks to 80 percent during the festive seasons. “Our experience with AWS over the past year has been excellent. AWS is now the cornerstone in our growth strategy," said Manish Saini, Vice President, Online Business, Ferns N Petals.

“We have recently launched two new businesses that include overseas expansion which is also hosted on AWS. We are now able to spend more time and resources toward enriching customer experience and are developing a new mobile app that will enhance their buying experience,” he added.

Novi Digital: A wholly owned subsidiary of Star India, uses AWS to run Hotstar, a flagship OTT platform for drama, movies and live sporting events.

With more than 20 million downloads in four months, Hotstar has seen one of the fastest adoptions of any new digital service anywhere in the world. In fact, during one of the Cricket World Cup matches, Hotstar and starsports.com combined reached a record total of over 2.3 million concurrent streams and more than 50 million video views.

“The scalable AWS cloud platform has enabled Hotstar to break many records in the last four months,” said Ajit Mohan, Head, Digital, Star India. “AWS has been a key partner in helping us deliver a compelling and seamless experience for millions of users.”

"Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS's eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, AWS.

“We are excited to share that Indian customers will be able to use the world’s leading cloud computing platform (AWS) in India in 2016–and we believe India will be one of AWS's largest regions over the long term," he added.