Our AWS Summits are free events around the globe designed for the cloud computing community – builders, customers, innovators – to connect, collaborate and learn about AWS. It was my honor and privilege to kick off the AWS Summit Online India, 2021 this morning. We have more than one lakh registered attendees, 175 technical sessions, nine different tracks, and five leadership keynote sessions. All of this is testimony to the fact that we are in the midst of the biggest tech innovation of our lifetime – cloud-led digital transformation. Which is why this year’s summit is bigger, bolder and more ambitious than before.
Something for everyone
AWS Summit Online is primarily about learning. Whether you are a cloud newbie or a long-time adopter, a start-up looking to build scale, or an enterprise with legacy – there is both range and depth in our event line-up. Customer transformation stories, to partner demos and sessions by technical gurus (including James Gosling, “Father of Java”), keynotes by AWS gurus – we have it all covered.For IT and business leaders – this is an opportunity to learn about industry use cases, business outcomes, real world applications, and to hear from AWS customers themselves.
For technologists – you can dive deep into the latest AWS technologies, get a step-by-step demo across various topics, explore a range of use cases and learn best practices to build architecture and code to build for the future.
AWS’s India Mission
Behind this well-curated, informative, thought provoking event lies the fundamental question – why do we do this. The answer is simple. Here at AWS in India, we have a simple mission – empowering builders and businesses to build a better India, and to do so with speed, scale, flexibility, and reliability.
Our global scale and growth story is well documented and frequently cited. AWS has gone from an idea to a $ 50 billion business worldwide in less than 15 years. We are in 190 countries, have 200+ fully featured services, 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions around the world, and 18 more Availability Zones in pipe. No one provides as many regions and multiple Availability Zones as AWS does. Last year, as part of AWS Activate, we provided more than $1 billion in AWS credits to help startups and early-stage entrepreneurs get the resources needed to launch and accelerate their businesses. AWS training and certifications continues to upskill individuals and organizations and we have today more than 400,000+ AWS certified builders across the globe – helping them all get more out of the cloud. I could use many more statistics.
However, I am here to delve deeper into our mission and purpose in India. AWS is the largest and most widely adopted cloud platform in India today. We have hundreds of thousands of active customers and the largest ecosystem of partners countrywide. As Andy Jassy, our CEO said, “AWS in India is here to stay, and we are going to be here for a long time.”
We continue to expand our infrastructure – AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region has three Availability Zones and our new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) when it is ready by mid-2022. Our customer base is growing, and we are committed to staying ahead of their needs by building out our infrastructure for the future of India.
Our time is now
India today is in the midst of the perfect storm of digitization. Businesses of all sizes are embracing the cloud. This coupled with the demographic gifts and enablers in place including the ‘India stack’ and the three digital infrastructure highways is an opportunity of a lifetime. With more than 40,000 startups, India has the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. More than 75 million SMBs are the backbone of India and they generate more than one-third of India’s employment and half of our exports. India is one of the world’s largest open markets for technology companies today.
Discontinuities and disruptions like those we have seen in the last year have accelerated change faster than anyone could have predicted. When I talk to customers, there is a clear realization that businesses that were thinking deeply about technology and cloud are coming out of this crisis much stronger. The pace of change has accelerated, and I am seeing a new level of urgency – digital roadmaps that used to run in quarters and years are today being built and deployed in weeks.
There has never been a better time to experiment and iterate on new ideas in India. Some of the largest enterprise digitization journeys are being enabled by AWS. Startups that are disrupting longstanding industries and inventing new ones are doing so on AWS – we are the cloud provider of choice for startups in India and around the world. You can now literally build a business from anywhere – ideate, hire, train, collaborate, sell, deliver and support virtually. ISVs and SaaS businesses coming out of India and building on AWS are a compelling example of this.
Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are core to our mission in India – they are India’s backbone and the key to moving India forward. We are now seeing a generation of digital SMBs that are building on AWS. To me ‘S’ in SMB also stands for Simple, and we at AWS are working hard to make technology simple and accessible for Indian SMB’s.
Success stories of our Indian customers
These customers are only a few from thousands who exemplify this new, accelerated pace of digital transformation and innovation.
Dream 11
In 2020, Dream 11, Indian fantasy sports platform, registered 100 million users, up from 2 million in 2016. The app has an average uptime of 99.99 percent. I believe their extraordinary rise owes no small debt to their data-driven culture. Every decision is backed by data and technology, and the new “wow factors” in features is helping fuel customer retention and growth.
Ashok Leyland
Ashok Leyland is a global automotive leader and the second largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in India. iAlert is their connected vehicle telematics platform, which has resulted in 300% improvement in data processing speed, 30% uplift in Key Performance Indicator (KPI) computation and 40% reduction in costs.
Freshworks
Software firm Freshworks, a B2B unicorn, and visionary in analyst firm Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, has Machine Learning embedded across everything they do. They have built 33,000 models on Amazon SageMaker, and have cut down the time it takes to build these models from eight weeks to less than a week.
CropIn
An agri-tech startup, CropIn has increased surveillance to reduce risk for over 6.1 million acres of farmland, and 2.1 million farmers, and as a result delivers greater efficiency, productivity, and predictable outcomes for farmers.
What have we really learnt?
Let me bring this together across the customer impact stories I have shared with you, and across hundreds of thousands of active customers in India who are leveraging AWS to drive transformation – what have we learnt from customers in India?
- It starts with the will to invent and reinvent. The businesses that I see in India being able to do this are relentless about getting to the truth of their business and they acknowledge that you cannot fight gravity.
- These businesses are constantly raising the bar on talent and bringing in builders who are looking for solutions to real problems. They are obsessed with customer needs and invent to meet these needs. They do not invest in technology for the sake of technology.
- Speed is a choice. The ability to move fast is a muscle that must be exercised regularly, and you need to be ready for action. To move fast means an organizational culture that has urgency and that actually wants to experiment.
- Use the platform with the broadest set of tools. AWS’ operational maturity gives our customers an edge over competitors. When you want to innovate you should start with the platform with the most breadth and depth which is AWS.
- Finally – cloud is the single biggest enabler of experimentation I have seen in my career. It makes experiments and innovation easier, faster, and less risky.
All of these learnings are not about technology – they are about leadership and culture. What really matters is a culture of innovation, focus on customers, and understanding the need for urgency and speed.
