Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to start operating datacentres in India from 2016, as part of a push to get more of the sub-continent using its cloud services.
The company claims to have tens of thousands of customers using its services in India, and plans to capitalise on this by offering services from a dedicated datacentre sited in the region.
Andy Jassy, senior vice-president of AWS, said its existing Indian customer base are currently using cloud services delivered from one of the firm’s global infrastructure regions, but latency and data sovereignty issues prevent others from following suit.
“Several customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can [deliver] even lower latency to their users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,” 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. We believe India will be one of AWS's largest regions over the long term,” he added.
The plans have won the support of Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors, which relies on the AWS infrastructure to deliver fleet management capabilities to its customers and to create inventory forecasting systems.
Jagdish Belwal, CIO of Tata Motors, said working with AWS has sped up the time it takes the company to deploy new, experimental services, which has increased its business agility.
“Whenever we plan on rolling out a project or experimenting with technology, AWS helps us in quickly provisioning the required infrastructure and enables us in getting up and running at a fast pace,” he said.
AWS isn’t the first cloud giant to set its sights on grabbing a larger slice of the Indian cloud market, as Microsoft pledged in October 2014 to open three datacentres by the end of 2015, and IBM has also previously committed to opening two facilities.
