Plugging into the Amazon cloud

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It wasn’t long ago that businesses, especially those with comprehensive IT setups in the banking, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and new economy sectors, had full control over their technology systems and services.

By Sudhir Chowdhary

Their IT departments were the gatekeepers and caretakers of a carefully constructed and managed environment, the sole facilitators of changes and requests.

Cloud technologies have obliterated such monopolies. Cloud computing has quickly transitioned from being a mere buzzword; it is impacting the delivery of business outcomes for enterprises. For the simple reason that it provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. With cloud computing, companies don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, enterprises can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources they need to power their newest bright idea or operate their IT department. What is more, they can access as many resources as they need, almost instantly, and only pay for what they use.

“We are going through a shift in technology that is unlike any other in our lifetime, and it’s happening at a startling pace—much faster than anybody anticipated,” says Bikram Singh Bedi, head of India region, Amazon Web Services. Cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services—which is having a dream run in its cloud business in India—own and maintain the network-connected hardware required for application services—be it running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or supporting the critical operations of a firm’s business—while the customers provision and use what they need via a Web application.

In India too, whether a company should adopt cloud technologies is no longer in question. The question is to what extent, and whether the applications and services will be built or purchased. “It seems pretty apparent at this point the cloud has become the new normal,” says Bedi (see interview). The cloud market opportunity in India is estimated to be $1 billion by 2015-end, according to Greyhound Research. Research firm Gartner says that typical use cases for the cloud in India include disaster recovery as a service, e-business Web hosting, industry-specific applications and collaboration.
Workplace in command

Globally Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the business is known, has over a million active customers across 190 countries that range from start-ups, small and medium companies, enterprises, education institutions, non-profit organisations and government agencies. India is a very important market to AWS too; it has over 12,000 customers in India and is growing at a very rapid pace.

For instance, Tata Motors uses AWS to develop innovative services such as Tata FleetMan Telematics and Fleet management service that has been designed to address the pressing concern of commercial vehicle fleet owners to manage the efficiency and productivity of their fleet.

The service helps fleet owners in increasing productivity and profitability by enabling fleet owners to track the vehicle, use geo-fencing for alerts and so on. The collected vehicle data is stored on AWS and then analysed on the cloud. The information can be accessed by fleet owners using Tata FleetMan Telematics portal as well as Fleetman mobile apps.

Another Indian enterprise that uses AWS is Apeejay Stya and Svran Group, a five-generation old family run business with 5,000 employees, with diversified group of interests in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, merchant banking, merchant trading, publishing, rural agriculture and education. The group is spread across 52 locations in India and five international locations including Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Dubai and the US. The Amazon solution has enabled Apeejay to centralise IT as well as shorten the process of evaluating and deploying new applications from one year to less than three months.

A magic wand for SMBs

The Amazon cloud helps Ferns N Petals, a leading flower and gifts retailer in India, scale and manage web traffic efficiently and cost effectively, catering to over one million customers monthly across the world. Given the fluctuation and unpredictable web traffic, especially on special occasions such as Valentine’s day and Mother’s day, when they have close to 1,500 concurrent visitors per second on the website, AWS has scaled seamlessly to cater to all kinds of workloads so that its customers have a great user experience.

Then, BookMyShow, a leading online movie and events ticketing provider, uses Amazon cloud-based data warehouse service called Amazon Redshift to store its customer usage data and run analytics on it, by integrating its custom built on-premises application Tableau – a visualisation tool, with the cloud. This helps BookMyShow identify customer trends based on their usage and behaviour, in order to segment its customers more accurately, communicate with them meaningfully and make appropriate recommendations.

Start-ups are accelerating their business all through the cloud too. MindTickle uses AWS to scale seamlessly from single digit customers to over hundred enterprise customers, including the likes of Yahoo!, InMobi, eBay, CTG, Vodafone, SAP, and serve over 100,000 users. MindTickle is a SaaS platform that combines learning best practices such as micro-learning, social learning, gamification and mobile with a data-driven approach to make the sales and customer service departments more productive.

Another example is Classle, a social enterprise that provides a cloud-based social learning platform directed at students in rural India. Classle allows students from rural India, who unlike their counterparts in metros do not have access to higher standards of education, connect with other students as well as experts and professionals from academia, research institutes and the industry. AWS has enabled Classle in empowering over 100 institutions that deploy Classle Cloud Campuses and catering to over 300,000 student members.

Without doubt, the online retailer is finding many takers for its cloud business in India.

CLOUD POWER
* Globally AWS has over a million active customers across 190 countries
* AWS has over 12,000 customersin India and growing at a very rapid pace
* Popular AWS workloads include website hosting, Big Data analytics, social games, mobile apps
* AWS has set up two edge locations in Mumbai and Chennai
* These locations enables businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users in India with low latency and high data transfer speeds

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