Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing arm of retail giant Amazon. According to the company, the global spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to USD 304.9 billion, up from USD 257.5 billion in 2020. The IT spending is also proportionally shifting to cloud and will accelerate post-Covid-19 pandemic, with cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020

Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) said, the cloud has had a really substantial impact on both the new companies that have started the last 15 years and existing companies reinventing themselves. “I think the real reason for the companies adopting the cloud so quickly is cost. If you can exclude the capital expenses into variable expense, and then lower the variable expense, you get read elasticity in operation.”

He gave an example of what Moderna did while building its Covidd-19 vaccine. “They basically built a digital manufacturing suite on top of, using compute and storage, machine learning and data warehousing and built their Covid-19 vaccine candidate in 42 days on top of AWS which otherwise would normally take 20 months.”

Amit Agarwal and Andrew Jassy

AWS was launched its Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region in June 2016 to help customers in India save costs, increase speed-to-market of new products and services, and quickly expand their geographic infrastructure footprint. “In the last seven years, Amazon has been able to digitise 2.5-million small businesses enabling USD 3-billion of exports and create millions of jobs,” Jassy said.

Amit Agarwal, Amazon India Chief and Jassy today announced a brand new USD 250 million Amazon Sambhav Venture Fund that will focus on three big priorities – small and medium businesses (SMB) digitisation, agri-tech innovations to empower farmer productivity and reach, and health tech to provide universal and quality health care for citizens separately. “The small and medium-sized businesses are often the engine and the lifeline of economies and it's true in India as well. And we are very passionate about trying to enable full acceleration of small and medium-sized businesses in fuelling innovation and the economy in India and so are building on what we did last year,” said Jassy.