Amazon’s direct headcount in India is 100,000. AWS has a dedicated public sector team of local employees on-the-ground who understand the demands of delivering critical government services and are working to drive innovation on behalf of their customers and AWS Partners, Moore said.
He said that India is an extremely important market for the public sector and healthcare vertical of the company, especially when talking about the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Moore said that the company has seen a dramatic acceleration of business in India as a result of the multibillion-dollar investment that the company made around five years ago to build a cloud region in India.
“India is really strategic to us because we’re just getting started in India,” Moore told ET. “The Government of India has seen the power of the AWS cloud over the last 18 months because we’ve been a very close partner of the government through all of that. And as a result of that, we believe that the trust in the cloud and the belief that the cloud really does deliver in terms of scale, security and reliability, has really accelerated the momentum for the cloud in India.
He said that one of the good outcomes of Covid was that governments around the world and specifically in India, saw the power of the cloud wherein telemedicine and call centres and Covid systems were managed at scale.
“We realise that Covid-19 drove a major acceleration in telemedicine, in digital health, in the data sharing medical research, and our customers have correspondingly innovated very rapidly with the support that we’ve been able to provide with the AWS cloud,” Moore said. “So what used to take years to develop and put online, we demonstrated that that can be done in days or weeks. And so it’s really opened the eyes of government and nonprofit organisations right around the world, including in India in a very profound way.”
AWS worked with C-DAC to build and launch the telemedicine service called e-SanjeevaniOPD which was rolled out across four states and served over 1 million patients in India who were seeking medical support virtually. Currently, it is serving around 17,000 patients across 28 Indian states, and it aims to support at least 100,000 consultations per day moving forward.
AWS was also involved in other Covid-related relief initiatives like Project StepOne which is a volunteer-led initiative and also COvAID which was a project initiated by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog to facilitate Covid relief support either in the form of monetary assistance or in kind. It is a logistics management system to track and route aid from across the world to maximize the availability and use of such equipment/funding.
He went on to say that the company’s new global program that was announced on Monday provides a three-year $40 million commitment from AWS to harness the power of cloud technology to advance health equity, globally. However, Moore was quick to add that the opportunities in India were not just restricted to Covid and that the country presented AWS with multiple themes or growth areas that could be leveraged.
“In addition to Covid there’s a lot of other opportunities in India. And we’ve been working on a lot of initiatives around smart cities, for example, working right across all the states of India, to look at how we can provide better solutions for urban areas in terms of all of the challenges that cities face,” he explained.
Apart from this, he said AWS had a firm focus on education as well as skilling in India. Smart agriculture too was another key theme that the company was working on extensively, Moore said.
On Thursday AWS also announced the launch of a new experience studio at the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) in Delhi. The studio was built in association with Niti Aayog, Intel and AWS. The company said the studio would be a hub for collaboration and experimentation to enable problem solving and innovation between government stakeholders, startups, enterprises, and industry domain experts.
“The studio will help showcase the potential of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/ VR), blockchain, and robotics to accelerate their application in public sector use cases,” the company said in a statement. “The studio will encourage open innovation and serve as a hub for government, healthcare, education, and nonprofit startups from India to showcase their solutions. It will also provide startups with an option to access necessary support to enhance and scale their solutions.”
