After IBM and Microsoft, Amazon plans to set up data centre in India next year

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it will open an AWS infrastructure region in India for its cloud computing platform in 2016.

“Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. 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 - and we believe India will be one of AWS’s largest regions over the long term,” Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, AWS, said in a statement.

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AWS’ customers in India include large companies like Tata Motors, Future Group, Jubilant Food Works and startups like PayTM, Hike, and Freshdesk.

AWS contributes nearly $5 billion a year in revenue to Amazon.

“In India, Amazon Web Services has got the highest market share in the startups segment , followed by IBM and Microsoft,” he added. Whereas, large enterprises in India are more with IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce as they want better storage to suit their complex IT environments. “IBM, Netmagic, AWS, and Azure are top four cloud vendors in India, and Google is doing well on the SaaS side,” Greyhound Research founder Sanchit Gogia said.

This year, Microsoft also announced its plans to set up local data centres. It will offer its commercial cloud services — Azure and Office 365 –by the end of 2015 from local data centres in India where the company sees a $2 trillion business opportunity.

Technology giant IBM is also planning to set up its second data centre in India to cater to the demand from various sectors including financial services and government. The US-based firm already has a data centre in Mumbai. “We are looking at setting up another public cloud data centre. As you know, sectors like government and financial services prefer their data residing within the country,” IBM India Managing Director Vanitha Narayanan said.

Local data centres mean organisations in India will benefit from data sovereignty and lower latency.

Gartner predicts high rates of spending on cloud services in India to continue through 2018 when the market is expected to reach $1.9 billion.