The battle for the public cloud is heating up in India, as Microsoft and Amazon fight it out for dominance in
MUMBAI: From bringing in big guns to run enterprise sales in the country and running full-page ads to counter each other's data centre launches to attempting to poach clients, these American giants are leaving no stone unturned to win in India.
Public clouds allow companies to buy computing and storage power without needing to own data centres. Also called infrastructure-as-a-service, the business was created by e-commerce companyAmazon. Its Amazon Web Services division is now on track to $10 billion in revenue this year. Microsoft, which was a later entrant to the space with its Azure offering, has said its public cloud revenue doubled this year but has not given out its revenue contribution.
India is the sleeping giant in the public cloud space. Gartner expects public cloud services in the country to reach $1.26 billion this year and it is growing at over 30%. India would provide a considerable edge to whichever company corners a lead in the market.
Public clouds allow companies to buy computing and storage power without needing to own data centres. Also called infrastructure-as-a-service, the business was created by e-commerce companyAmazon. Its Amazon Web Services division is now on track to $10 billion in revenue this year. Microsoft, which was a later entrant to the space with its Azure offering, has said its public cloud revenue doubled this year but has not given out its revenue contribution.
India is the sleeping giant in the public cloud space. Gartner expects public cloud services in the country to reach $1.26 billion this year and it is growing at over 30%. India would provide a considerable edge to whichever company corners a lead in the market.
In late June, AWS kicked the competition up a notch by opening its data centres in the country. AWS CEO Andy Jassy told ET that he expects the new data centres to accelerate the already fast growth in the country.
CIOs at two banking firms told ET that they were seeing increased pitches from AWS and Azure for parts of their public cloud deployment."They want us to put part of our non-core business on the cloud to try it. AWS is saying they now have the data centre and partners. There was data sovereignty issue with them before. And Microsoft we already have a relationship with," a CIO with a public sector bank told ET.
Industry watchers expect things to escalate in the coming months. "We believe this is the beginning of the Public Cloud war in India and expect it to become more intense in FY17 and FY18," Anshoo Nandwani, principal analyst at IT advisory firm Greyhound Research, told ET.
Clashes begin
Some of the skirmishes are easy to spot. On the day AWS announced its data centres in India, Microsoft sent out press releases touting its growth in cloud. The next day, there were front page ads touting the company's offerings.
Both companies are touting numbers to prove their grow ing clout in the market. Microsoft says it has won with a large number of Indian enterprises since it launched its local data centres last year. "In India, 52 of the top 100 Bombay Stock Exchange listed companies have adopted Azure within six months of the launch of cloud services from local data centers," Peter Gartenberg, General Manager, Enterprise business, Microsoft India.
AWS CEO Jassy, on the other hand, had said that AWS has over 75,000 clients in India and that 89 out the top 100 startups in the country use his platform. They are also roping in senior talent to boost relationships with IT head honchos at Indian enterprises.
Former India Country head at EMC Global Services Ananthraman Balakrishnan joined AWS three months ago. IBM, whose Softlayer cloud is also in the market, hired Microsoft's Karan Bajwa last month. Bajwa helped spearhead Microsoft Azureand Office 365 cloud offerings.
Experts say that though the public cloud market is growing strongly, cloud providers are likely to poach each other's customers.
"There are lots of new opportunities, but we also see in some cases that providers are able to win back customers of their competition. Even though the market is dominated by AWS, there is enough room for competition and hence necessarily winning each other's customers is not the only option," DD Mishra, research director at Gartner India, said.
One customer that has moved cloud providers is Ameyo, a cloud-based contact centre software startup. Ameyo shifted its Emerge customer service offering to Microsoft earlier this month.
"We started on AWS initially. But then we looked very strategically at what we needed from a cloud provider. We were also talking to Azure and given their partner ecosystem and the possibility that we could be introduced to their customers, we decided to shift. We still use AWS for our internal needs," says Nayan Jain, chief technology officer at Ameyo, said.
Startups are an important market for both AWS and Azure. Microsoft, through its BizSpark program, offers cloud credits, while Amazon said it is looking to start a PopUp loft targeted at startups in Bengaluru.
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