Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced newly forged partnerships with HDFC Securities, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Tech Mahindra during its annual tech conference, Re:Invent.

While HDFC Securities Ltd has built its latest trading app, HDFC Sky, on the AWS cloud platform, the TCS partnership comprises a generative AI practice with AWS that it hopes will aid businesses make good on opportunities. Tech Mahindra, interestingly, has partnered with AWS to build a sports cloud platform to offer immersive digital capabilities for sports organisations and immersive experiences for sports fans.

Tata Consultancy Services' partnership with AWS will see India's top IT major launch its AWS generative AI practice to enable other businesses to capitalise on any potential for AI that they may possess. TCS has said it is already in the process of training over 1 lakh employees on generative AI, with the sole purpose of enhancing their expertise and certifying over 25,000 of these employees. The TCS-AWS generative AI practice, the company said in a release, could potentially enable enterprises to scale up suitable solutions for varying business needs using AWS' services like Amazon Bedrock.

"AWS helped us create a culture of builders within HDFC Securities by enabling us to rapidly experiment at a lower cost so that we can innovate on behalf of our customers,” said Sandeep Bhardwaj, Chief Operating and Digital Officer at HDFC Securities, in a statement on HDFC Sky.

“Thanks to the scalability and reliability of AWS, we have effortlessly catered to a rapidly expanding customer base of tech-savvy investors," he added, "We are pleased to have significantly reduced our time to market for pioneering services like HDFC SKY."

Serving 75 million customers, the HDFC Securities app helps in user-friendly trading of shares, commodities, futures, currencies, IPOs, mutual funds and ETFs. The company estimates that it has cut down on infrastructure and management costs to the tune of 50% by building HDFC Sky on the AWS platform as opposed to in-house infrastructure.

On its part, Tech Mahindra foresees data-driven insights that it hopes to garner from the AWS platform as a key component to its plan of enhancing sports consumption and personalising sports-viewing experiences. "Our collaboration will offer the broadest and deepest set of cloud services and transform how fans interact with their favourite sports, which can create a dynamic and captivating experience for viewers," said Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Growth at Tech Mahindra.

The IT major foresees its newly forged AWS platform as a potential disruptor too, with Mitra highlighting that it could lead to opportunities for sports organisations and franchises to offer enhanced and content-driven fan engagement, which could lead to potential for monetisation and commerce.

Big names in Indian tech partnering with AWS are a testament to Amazon's cloud business seeing a lucrative market for enterprise clients in India. Speaking exclusively to CNBC-TV18, AWS enterprise strategist Clarke Rogers said that quicker scaling up and competitive pricing are the major catalysts for enterprise companies to embrace cloud migration.

"The cloud allows (these companies) to compute at a scale that you could not dream of or maybe could not afford," he said, "Sectors like healthcare and financial services — I know that India has a very robust payments market across phones, which can be a model for the world — are now thinking about business differently, and that's why you have even 100-year-old companies moving to the cloud."

Rogers added that the quicker pace of adoption notwithstanding, it's sectors with more regulations like healthcare that are also cautious about cloud adoption, whereas the SMB sector may be in a position to embrace cloud adoption quicker. "For the non-regulated large enterprises, they're diving deep into cloud adoption as fast as they can because they realise the strategic advantage and business advantage of using cloud versus maintaining data centres that may or may not be core to their business," he said.

A recent IDC survey estimates that the overall India public cloud services market will hit $17.8 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 23.4% for between 2022 and 2027. AWS is not only betting big on these estimates, but projected the inevitability of cloud-adoption just shy of a decade ago. The company invested $3.7 billion in India between 2016 and 2022, which led to the formation of two AWS zones in India — AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in 2016 and more recently, a Hyderabad region in 2022.

The company has announced that its total investments in setting up local cloud infrastructure in India will total to $12.7 billion by 2030, which brings AWS' total investment in India to $16.4 billion. AWS has also imparted cloud skills to over 4 million in the country since 2017.

(Edited by : Pihu Yadav)

First Published:Nov 27, 2023 8:12 PM IST