'It's Safe To Say That Cloud Has Become The Norm'

Bikram Singh Bedi, head of India, Amazon Internet Services, on emerging technology trends and why Indian businesses have no choice but to go digital

- Harichandan Arakali

Q What are the big trends in cloud computing for businesses and how are those playing out in India?

We are going through a shift in technology that is unlike any other. The pace is faster than anybody had anticipated. Over a period of time, very few companies will have their own data centres. It seems safe to say that cloud has become the norm.

One important consequence is that access to sophisticated IT is more of a level playing field today. Buying servers, storage and other hardware no longer differentiates you from the competition. The real differentiator is how you’re using the data that you get. That’s the first thing that we’re starting to see—that translates into analytics, be it reporting, live or predictive. Amazon Web Services [or AWS, whose Indian arm is Amazon Internet Services] has a whole range of offerings that are seeing strong traction with different customers.

For example, Lupin Pharma put together a business intelligence platform within four weeks of using AWS. Delhivery, a large logistics services business, is using a number of analytics services, such as Amazon Redshift [a data warehousing service] to build a complete reporting backend for itself, which helps it meet SLAs (service level agreements) with their customers.

That’s the first trend that we are seeing, where data and what you do with data and primarily analytics is getting to be important.

The other thing is this whole mobile space. Developers aren’t really adapting for mobile, but building for mobile.

AWS has a number of services for the mobile environment that are drawing many users. For instance, in media, all the important platforms that are in play today—21st Century Fox’s Hotstar, Voot from Viacom18 [part of Nework18, the publisher of