Amazon launches its first ever data centre in India

In order to build on the growing potential of cloud in India, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a part of U.S. based eCommerce giant Amazon.com, made a major announcement this week. (indianweb2.com)

The infrastructure-as-a-service division of the eCommerce company announced about its plans of opening its first ever data centres in Mumbai, India. With an operating margin of over a good 24 per cent, the company is on its way to gain the laurel of being a $10 billion annual business by the end of this year.

Talking about what prompted AWS to open its data centres in India, the company’s representative said that it has been a while that the company has been receiving requests from the customers for a region in the country either for reasons of data sovereignty or lower latency. This is why they thought that having a region in India would put their growth in the country on a fast lane. According to the information available, an AWS region can have multiple data centres, or as the company prefers prefers calling them, availability zones.

Amazon is quite hopeful that its new data centres in India will contribute highly in boosting the volume of work that AWS can do with the healthcare and banking sectors in the country. According to sources, the company is also looking forward to working with the Indian government on its ambitious Digital India initiatives. Statistically speaking, about 89 of the top 100 Indian Startups are currently being hosted on AWS. Even big names like Axis Bank and the Tata Motors make use of the company’s cloud platform. In totality, 75,000 out of 1 million AWS’s active customers are stationed in India.

Since going live, the company has lowered the cost of its own offering as a strategic move. In the last eight years of its operation, it has seen its prices being slashed about 51 times. In fact, the company is famous for encouraging people and making them aware of the ways they can reduce the spending on its services.

According to the company, they have been successful in saving some 2 million customers about a whopping $350 million that would have been spent on AWS’ services. If for once you’re thinking that AWS is the first company to set up their data centres in India, you’re highly mistaken. IBM has already set up its data centres in the country that are being used for its Softlayer public cloud. Similarly, Microsoft has also set up its data centres that are being used by its Azure public cloud market.