AWS India head sees SMEs driving cloud business in 2022

The past year was a “dress rehearsal” for cloud adoption in India, said Puneet Chandok, president of Amazon Web Services (AWS) India and South Asia and Amazon Internet Services, who expects small and medium enterprises to drive AWS and cloud growth in 2022.

The new normal requires enterprises to have the agility to scale up or down rapidly, which is where cloud will play an important role, Chandok said. “Cloud is not just another tech revolution. It’s fundamentally a shift for building businesses in terms of how they operate,” he added.

AWS recently made a series of announcements aimed at democratising and simplifying machine learning and artificial intelligence at its annual summit, AWS re:Invent. These included SageMaker Canvas, a no-code machine learning capability which will allow organisations to leverage machine learning without having to hire data scientists.

“One thing a lot of customers will struggle with is skills,” said Chandok.

As more organisations, especially small and medium enterprises, adopt AI, tools and capabilities like this which do away with the need for trained professionals will help drive adoption. AWS also announced an AI-enabled scholarship programme with Intel and Udacity to prepare students for careers in machine learning, as well as a free service that will enable anyone to experiment with machine learning.

“India today is probably one of the world’s largest open markets for technology companies to serve,” said Chandok. Along with the IT services industry, the country is also home to the world’s third largest startup ecosystem. “There isn’t a market like India today, anywhere in the world, which is as large, as diverse, as open, so we’re really excited about simplifying technology and will continue to invest in the country,” he said.

All these offerings, said Chandok, would be relevant to customers in India as they increase cloud adoption and deal with the shortage of trained talent in these areas.

“The reason customers struggled to deploy AI at scale is because of a lack of skills,” he said. Simplifying AI and ML would make it easier for more small and medium enterprises to adopt it and benefit from it.

The upcoming Hyderabad data centres region will further help customers, especially in areas like media and OTT which require faster processing and millisecond latency.

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