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The new pairing will take on the partnership of Reliance Jio’s Infocomm and Microsoft, who joined forces last year to deliver cloud services
The public cloud market in India is booming, only being outpaced in the Asia Pacific region by Japan and Australia. In 2018, analysts valued the market at around $2.6 billion, but this is expected to swell to around $8 billion by 2023.
With such huge potential, it is no surprise that we are increasingly seeing cloud services companies partnering the subcontinent’s operators.
In August last year, Microsoft struck a 10-year deal with Reliance Jio’s Infocomm, aiming to sell cloud services to small businesses. In January 2020, Google Cloud partnered with Bharti Airtel, looking to leverage the companies roughly 325 million subscribers.
These announcements were surely food for thought for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which currently dominates India’s cloud market. Excluding a previous partnership with Airtel back in 2015, AWS has risen to prominence in India without any operator partners. However, the scope of these new telco partnerships seem to have spurred the company to action, today announcing a strategic partnership with Airtel.
“AWS brings over 175 services. We pretty much support any workload on the cloud. We have the largest and the most vibrant community of customers,” said Puneet Chandok, president of AWS in India and South Asia.
Airtel claims to be the leader in the country’s enterprise connectivity sector, serving more than 2,500 large businesses and over one million medium and small businesses. AWS is particularly interested in targetting these small to medium businesses, as well as startups, looking to offer them a wide range of solutions, including AI and edge technology.
The two partners will also focus their efforts on helping existing customers migrate to Airtel Cloud.
The Indian connectivity market continues to climb, with the coronavirus pandemic accelerating digitalisation, just as it has done around the world. The nation’s telcos are continuing to see a huge amount of interest from FAANG companies, with India’s huge market potential making it an emerging battleground for these international tech giants.
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