Amazon is expanding the reach of its cloud services business, AWS, with India, which is the company's newest partner. Amazon made the announcement on Wednesday about teaming up with Airtel, which is India's third largest telecom operator with more than 300 million subscribers.
With this new collaboration, Amazon aims to sell a wide range of its AWS services under Airtel cloud brand to businesses in India including small, medium, and large ones. The deal would also be beneficial for AWS as it will be able to further expand its dominance in India where it leads the cloud market.
This move is similar to a deal made last year between Reliance Jio, the largest telecom operator in India, and Microsoft, to sell cloud services to small businesses in the country. Both the companies agreed on a 10 years long partnership with the goal to serve millions of customers.
Other than that, Airtel also signed a similar cloud deal with Google this year in January. As per Airtel and Google's agreement, the companies would also be working together to build new services and help existing customers migrate to Airtel Cloud. Airtel also partnered with Verizon last year to sell BlueJeans video conferencing service to business customers in India.
The current deal between Airtel and Amazon is indicative of Airtel's mission to create businesses beyond its telecom venture. Deals with carriers was a common occurrence in India a decade ago when tech companies would rush to amass users in the country, and now a similar strategy being followed shows the phase of cloud adoption in India.
India is the second largest internet market in the world with about half a billion people that came online last decade and the growing use of digital tools, storage services, and online payments. The country has emerged as one of the leading grounds for cloud services, the market of which is estimated to reach $7.1 billion by 2024.
