The battle for the public cloud is heating up in India, as Microsoft and Amazon fight it out for dominance in one of the fastest growing markets in the world.
From bringing in big guns to run enterprise sales in the country and running full-page ads to counter each other’s data centre launches to attempting to poach clients, these US giants are leaving no stone unturned to win in India.
Public clouds allow companies to buy computing and storage power without needing to own data centres.
Also called infrastructure-asa-service, the business was created by ecommerce company Amazon. Its Amazon Web Services division is now on track to $10 billion in revenue this year. Microsoft, which was a later entrant to the space with Azure offering, has said its public cloud revenue doubled this year but has not given out its revenue contribution.
India is the sleeping giant in the public cloud space. Gartner expects public cloud services in the country to reach $1.26 billion this year and it is growing at over 30%. India would provide a considerable edge to whichever company corners a lead in the market.
In late June, AWS kicked the competition up a notch by opening its data centres in the country. CEO Andy Jassy told ET that he expects new data centres to accelerate already fast growth in the country. CIOs at two banking firms told ET that they were seeing increased pitches from AWS and Azure for parts of their public cloud deployment.
“They want us to put part of our non-core business on the cloud to try it. AWS is saying they now have the data centre and partners. There was data sovereignty issue with them before. And Microsoft we already have a relationship with,” a CIO with a public sector bank told ET.
Industry watchers expect things to escalate in the coming months. “We believe this is the beginning of the Public Cloud war in India and expect it to become more intense in FY17 and FY18,” Anshoo Nandwani, principal analyst at IT advisory firm Greyhound Research, told ET.
Some of the skirmishes are easy to spot. On the day AWS announced its data centres in India, Microsoft sent out press releases touting its growth in cloud. The next day, there were front page ads touting the company’s offerings.
Both companies are touting numbers to prove their growing clout in the market.
Source : The Economic Times (Delhi)
Neeraj Kumar Singal 